


There's Blood in My Body and It Sounds Like This:

by airdeari



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: An Uncomfortable Amount of Nonsexual Bondage (Uncomfortable Because Sometimes It Is Kind Of Sexy), Blood, Enemies to Lovers, Espionage, F/M, Hubert and Ferdinand become Buddy Cops entirely against their will, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Silver Snow Route, Slow Burn, a lot of it, and Mutual Jealousy?, but also Mutual Denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:00:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 65,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23145079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: Oh.As the silver snows melt into spring, so too does Bernadetta vanish from Garreg Mach, abandoning her position in the army of the Church of Seiros. Incredulous and suspicious (and maybe something else a little more sentimental), Ferdinand seeks to uncover the truth of her disappearance and rescue a damsel in distress. When instead he finds himself caught in the teeth of the horrid lapdog of the Emperor, he has no choice but to feed Hubert the truth of why he was sneaking alone into an Adrestian stronghold. That is when he learns that, not only is he in way over his head, but Bernadetta may be in even graver danger than he had ever feared. If these bitter archnemeses want to save her life, they will have to do the unthinkable: cooperate.
Relationships: Bernadetta von Varley/Hubert von Vestra, Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Ferdibertadetta, Ferdinand von Aegir/Bernadetta von Varley, Ferdinand von Aegir/Bernadetta von Varley/Hubert von Vestra, Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 48
Kudos: 125





	1. There’s nobody sicker than someone like me, I’m just a ghost in a blood machine

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a transparent ruse to champion an OT3 with the very specific dynamic I see them sharing as well as the incredibly silly and fun-to-say ship name I prefer for them (please treat yourself to saying "Ferdibertadetta" out loud at least once), and also to make you curious enough about the song lyrics I lift for the fic & chapter titles that you’ll join me in listening to indie gay angst pop group Lo-ghost (available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/artist/2ylCUQW0mn5N0gC0Ko7HNa?si=D2WIQWsxTPmOY0DXdErT7A) and [Bandcamp](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/album/theres-blood-in-my-body-and-it-sounds-like-this)) and ideally make them popular enough that they’ll tour outside of South Africa so I can finally witness their incredibly relatable energy live in concert.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First Lo-ghost lyric of the journey is from Ghost in a Blood Machine, which has [an absolutely stunning music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qad5UiSTc9M) if you want to feel the emotions "gay" and "repressed" even more strongly than just by listening to the song.

The curtains were rarely drawn in the office of the Imperial Household. Even though it sat on the third floor and pointed where none outside could find a view in, the window itself stretched so wide that just the sight of the empty glass pane felt revealing. Furthermore, too much sunlight irritated the eyes, and it brought out those unsightly browning-red spots that had never fully washed out of the rug from when the former Marquis Vestra had bled to death on the floor. It had not been Hubert’s initial intent to stab him, but he was nothing if not prepared with multiple contingencies for any plan; when dark magic would not strangle all of the life out of his father, he had a knife to finish the job.

Not for the first time, Hubert gazed out of the exposed window as he brewed both coffee and yet more contingencies. Too frequently for his liking, he found himself standing here, circling back to the same useless thought: _This is not how I imagined the war going_. He had never been so foolish as to expect the professor would betray the Church and side with the Empire, though Lady Edelgard had coveted the possibility most dearly. He also, however, had not expected _all_ of their fellow Black Eagles to eventually betray them as well. Though they had never offered support in the conquest in all these years since it began—which Hubert had begrudgingly worked around—recent months found every last one of them concurrently disappeared from the Empire and its amassed territories. The reports from his network of spies at that time had him scraping at the bottom of his stores for every last coffee bean he could scrounge up, grind, and sip while staring out the window, because the resurrection of the professor, whom he had personally witnessed falling off a cliff to her assured demise, who had not been seen or heard of in all these five years, and who evidently was still faithful to the shambles of the Church that still existed, was _definitely_ not how he had imagined the war going.

Though the liquid was fresh from boiling, Hubert sipped at his scalding cup anyway, desperate for the edge it would give him to overcome today’s trials. No sooner had he burned his tongue than the knock he had been anticipating sounded at his door. For lack of space, he set his cup on what he believed at a glance was the least important of the papers strewn about his desk.

A small face peered through the narrowest crack in the door. Most of the servants wandering through the castle halls, relaying news from door to door and carrying trays of food and drink, were orphans of the Empire by way of the Church’s malice. Though eager to play their small part in the war effort, most were still terrified when it came to them to deliver anything to the new Marquis Vestra. The few who were brave enough to venture to his door knew their way around him as if sworn to his certain secrecy, and were beginning to learn his ways, as well. He gave a silent nod to the girl in his doorway, inviting her to speak.

She nodded back. “The trespasser apprehended yesterday has been brought to the castle as per your request, Minister,” she said.

That was the message he had been… _expecting_ would be too imprecise a word, and he truly had not been expecting this whole debacle. _Dreading_ was more accurate.

“Send him in through the servants’ passages to keep him out of sight. Disarmed, if he is not already.” He lifted his cup again, making a vain effort of tidying the top of his desk, then called an afterthought to the closing door. “And have a pot of tea brought up, as well.”

The door opened again. “Poisoned, sir?”

His lip twitched into a smile on one side. With bitter regret, he said, “No. A fruit blend would be best, if we have it in our stores. Citrus or somesuch. If not, the house blend will suffice.”

The wrinkle in her brow was there and gone again in the span of a blink. Hubert did not miss it.

The thing about constantly coming up with contingencies is that it also trains the reflex of thinking quickly under pressure. Those neural pathways that light up during a brainstorm to find all paths around a problem are well-trained and respond quickly to an imminent crisis. Thus, Hubert added in time, “But empty a sugar jar and fill it with finely-ground salt instead.”

A girl after his own coldblooded heart, she sneered as she exited.

He busied his hands with the stacking and sorting of pages on his desk, less for the sake of organization and more for the appearance of it. His mind was too busy running through the various next steps, the questions to pose, the tone to take, the way to get what he needed from the man he was about to receive in his office for tea. Such diplomacy was certainly out of character for him, but he was known to tailor his methods to the situation. Reasoning with big-headed nobles required as much diplomacy as he was able to wring out of whatever he had that sufficed for a heart.

Anything he had rehearsed fell out of his head (probably by way of his dropped jaw) when the door opened and the disheveled man known as Ferdinand von Aegir was all but shoved inside. The past five years had been kind to a fresh-faced teenage noble, even if Hubert’s spies had not, by the looks of the bruise forming under a cheekbone much more defined than it had been in their academy days. Even when ripped and rumpled, his red and navy coat cut him a gallant figure. He looked every bit the noble he had always seen in himself. The image would have worked better were the fury in his glower more righteous than petulant.

That was, of course, to say nothing of the flaming red elephant in the room that was cascading from his scalp to halfway down his back.

“Hubert von Vestra,” he said bitterly. His wrists strained at the rope that bound them together.

“And you, of course, need no introduction, though I am sure you would love to give it,” Hubert said, waving off the soldiers who had brought him in. “You always did love the sound of your own name to such a degree that linguists the world over have been struggling to discover a word more powerful than _vain_ to describe it.”

“Enough with your jeering!” His voice had not gotten lower since last they met, but it resounded more deeply and firmly when he raised it. “I did not come here out of nostalgia for our foolish schoolboy banter.”

“No, you came here because you were defeated, bound, and dragged here at my mercy,” Hubert replied. “But we will come to the heart of the matter if you wish. Sit.”

He gestured to the chair in front of his desk as he circled around to its other side. Ferdinand looked over his shoulder, at the office’s shut door and the absence of soldiers. He made a tentative few steps towards the seat he was offered, but did not take it.

Undeterred, Hubert sat in his own chair, using the cover of the desk to hide the bounce of his right leg. At this moment, he realized that he had forgotten the latter half of his coffee and left it to cool over in the mug at the corner of his desk. Clearly he had enough energy despite it.

“The last time I saw you,” Hubert said, “must have been some time after your hair last saw a pair of scissors.”

“I would wager that my hair has seen scissors more recently than yours has seen a comb,” Ferdinand retorted, unable to resist biting at the bait. “Or soap.”

“But we digress,” Hubert said, with a direct look to Ferdinand that said, with perhaps too much glee, _If I’m still a foolish schoolboy, then so are you_. “I’ve given much thought to it, and I cannot imagine any reason I would find a disgraced nobleman who has turned his back on the Empire skulking about Fort Merceus, alone, with nary a battalion to assist him. Unfortunately, I have no choice but to ask the traitor himself. So—why?”

There _was_ righteous fury in Ferdinand, Hubert saw then. “I think you know very well why you might find me here,” he stated.

“I think I may,” Hubert agreed, leaning his chin on his steepled fingers. “But I wouldn’t want to put words in your mouth when I know you take great offense to such an act. Why don’t you tell me yourself?”

“What have you done with her?” Ferdinand uttered.

With anyone else, Hubert might have suspected this question was a distracting deflection. With someone as simple as Ferdinand, he was sure that it ruled out the possibility that the enemy was attempting reconnaissance of the fort with the intent of capturing it. But it still seemed such an obvious lie—surely the Church had reasoned that the deposed archbishop had been in the Empire’s captivity since the siege on Garreg Mach, yet Ferdinand was only seeking her out five years later, and entirely alone.

Hubert kept his cards close. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you mean,” he lied with a smile.

“You know very well who I mean!” Ferdinand yelled, pumping his bound fists. “Bernadetta!”

So much for keeping his cards close.

He could not help but blink his eyes wide, dropping his smirk in the confusion. It would be a lie to say he had not thought of the young Miss von Varley since their school days—fainting from fright at the sight of a person’s smile and the sound of his laugh tended to leave a lasting impression—but he had not thought her name would come between him and Ferdinand again, now of all times, here of all places. He swept a hand across his face and through the hair in front of his eye (when _had_ it last seen a comb, anyway?) to compose himself, forcing out a chuckle towards the desk. “I beg your pardon?”

Although the twitch of the furrow in Ferdinand’s brow said that he had seen the slip, he did not lower his guard. Perhaps he thought it was just a rehearsed part of Hubert’s manipulative schemes.

“If she has claimed that I laid a curse upon her that keeps her bound indoors,” Hubert said, “I regret to inform you that I had no hand in the matter, and she has played you for an absolute fool.”

“Do not feign ignorance with me,” Ferdinand hissed, stepping closer to the desk. “She is _gone_ , vanished without a trace, and I can think of only one person nefarious enough to be behind it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I would never be so cruel as to wrest her from her bedroom against her will,” Hubert drolled. “Have you really not considered that, perhaps, she absconded of her own volition, to be free of overbearing fools such as you?”

Ferdinand huffed a sarcastic laugh. “Yes, that is exactly the story you forced her to pen, is it not?” He seemed to try to fold his arms, only to find his wrists bound, and set his hands back at his waist again. “I did not believe it in her own handwriting, and I certainly shall not believe it from your deceitful lips.”

“Leaving a note behind explaining her motives is explicitly vanishing _with_ a trace. Have you tried looking exactly where she told you she would be instead of blaming the new regime for all of your problems like the jealous brat that you are?”

“She would _never_ return to House Varley!” Ferdinand cried, red in the face from either shouting his conspiracies or watching Hubert unravel them with rapid speed. “The monastery was her safe haven away from the likes of her horrible father!”

“The current Count Varley is no longer a threat to his daughter or anyone else,” Hubert said. “He has been, on Her Majesty’s command, placed under—”

 _House arrest_ , he did not finish. Confined to exactly the place that Bernadetta had supposedly fled to. Hubert lost his smirk in exchange for something very grim.

“Did she really say that she was returning to House Varley,” he said in a low voice.

“Yes! A gaping hole in your supposed cover story. Had you told her to leave her location undisclosed, your scheme might almost have been believable.” Ferdinand puffed up like a bird too pleased with himself during a mating season. “Your biggest mistake was in addressing the letter to me. I know Bernadetta much too well to be fooled by your tricks.”

When Hubert clasped his entwined fingers so tightly that his hands began to shake, he rose swiftly from his desk and turned to the window, willing the emotions stewing in his head to cease simmering so he could _think_. “Yet you are somehow fooled by the ones I didn’t even play,” he muttered. “Did you happen to take Bernadetta’s farewell letter with you on your harebrained attempt at a rescue mission?”

Ferdinand paused, as if trying to work out in his naïve little mind how this could be part of Hubert’s dark plot. “What does it matter to you?” he answered eventually.

“Much less than it matters to you,” Hubert retorted. “I’ll be damned if all of this turns out to be nothing more than a melodramatic episode in your nauseating courtship.”

“A- _ha!_ ” Ferdinand cried, outstretching both arms before him to point at Hubert with a finger from each hand. “I _knew_ this plot was borne from your jealousy! You seek to steal her hand from mine by way of force!”

When Ferdinand had his heart set on it, there was no exhausting his desire for contrived competition. Lady Edelgard had known this for years, but Hubert primarily by proxy from the times she sought respite in complaining to him about Ferdinand’s dogged attempts at relevance by way of forced comparisons to Her Majesty. That changed at Garreg Mach when the professor pulled Hubert from his exclusive regimen of magic lessons, handed him a spear, and had him face off against von Aegir to learn the ways of the lance, of all horrible fates.

Thereafter, Ferdinand sought the same one-sided rivalry with Hubert as he did with Edelgard. He begged the professor to teach him magic, doubled his hours in the training hall with the lance to keep his edge over Hubert, and gloated at mealtimes about his growing prowess at fighting on horseback. The two had gotten into a horrid shouting match when Hubert declined an extracurricular spar and gave the snide excuse of his dedication to matters concerning Lady Edelgard’s present and future wellbeing, and the rest was history.

Except where the rest was to do with Bernadetta. 

It was not difficult to tell that the unsubtle oaf had taken a fancy to her. On more than one occasion, Hubert had witnessed her fleeing at full sprinting speed from Ferdinand’s brash advances, having no doubt mistaken them for some sort of threat on her life. Once it crossed the line from halfway-entertaining folly to a public inconvenience bordering on harassment, Hubert used all of his threatening demeanor to order Ferdinand to cease and desist, lest he run the poor girl to her death. Ferdinand, unfortunately, interpreted this threat in two incorrect ways: first, as a tacit confession that Hubert also fancied Bernadetta; and therefore second, as a reciprocation of rivalry.

By all known measures, Hubert had no interest in Bernadetta. He would never consider courting her, nor did he think of gifting her with flowers or sweets, as Ferdinand began to do in earnest. The trouble was that he never thought of those things about anyone, so it was not a terribly useful metric.

What he would do was defend her when she was under assault in social affairs that were none of his business. What he would do was carefully search her purse for her room key when she fainted so that he could take her back to the comfort of her bedroom rather than make her wake up surrounded by strangers in the infirmary. What he would do was cover his smiles, curb his laughs in her presence in consideration of her wellbeing. What he would do was hide the embroidery she had once stitched along a ripped seam in his uniform jacket by folding his arms close to his chest, as if no one else were worthy enough to see it.

But all of that was years in the past.

“Accept that she will never fall for the likes of a villain like you,” Ferdinand continued, obstinate.

“Very well,” Hubert conceded. “So you maintain she might yet fall for a boor like you?”

Ferdinand scoffed, turning his head so that he did not commit the ignoble affront of rolling his eyes directly at someone. “ _Yet_ ,” he repeated with indignance.

Oh.

“On second thought, speak no further. I seem to have lost interest in this topic,” Hubert muttered, staring past him towards the door. Just beside it, the soldiers had dumped Ferdinand’s belongings: three lances, an axe, and a small pack that Hubert now approached. “Incidentally. Where is the letter?”

“You will not find it there,” Ferdinand said. “If you must know, I carry it now, in my breast pocket.”

“Your coat has no breast pocket,” Hubert said as he knelt and sought the clasps on Ferdinand’s bag.

In retrospect, perhaps he should have looked up first. Ferdinand was slow to respond. “It does, within the lining. It is on the left side.”

The side closest to the heart, of course. He was ever the romantic. “Do you tell me this because you’ve been suddenly overcome by rationality after an endless stream of conspiracy theories constructed against me, or do you mean to distract me from searching your belongings?” Hubert asked.

“You may search my belongings if you like,” Ferdinand said, chin high. “You will find nothing of value to you.”

“I see.” A twenty-five-year-old’s knees probably were not supposed to click with a twinge consistently upon standing from a crouch, but Hubert had been ignoring that for at least a year now. “So you are simply still incapable of being anything other than forthright and honest, even in this wicked world. How utterly endearing.”

Ferdinand widened his stance and narrowed his eyes as Hubert approached him. A single ornamental clasp at the waist stood between Hubert and the letter—if he even chose to bother with it; it only held the coat shut at the waist. Then it was only a matter of a hand slipped into the silk lining pressed against Ferdinand’s chest, and the look upon his face, daring yet wary, brave in the face of fear, proud even when vulnerable.

Insurmountable obstacles, evidently. Hubert changed strategy once his instincts—that panging in his chest that was the closest thing he ever felt to _fright_ —told him he could not proceed.

The knife was in his hand in a flash: single-edged, with an inch of serration near the hilt. Ferdinand raised his bound hands in unsure fists when the gleaming metal pointed toward him. Hubert grabbed both sets of knuckles with one sprawling grasp to steady Ferdinand’s hands and sank the knife into empty space between his palms, digging downward with the bite of the blade to rip through the ropes.

Before Ferdinand could get a word out through his gaping jaw, there came a knock at the door. His mouth stayed stupidly ajar but blessedly silent as Hubert bid the entry of a servant with a tea tray. The whole room lit up with the scent of the same southern fruit blend that Hubert knew from when it had enveloped Ferdinand in the mornings of their school days.

The servant laid the tray on Hubert’s desk—now that he had made enough space for such things—as Hubert took his seat behind it again, hiding what was perhaps too great of a smile behind one hand. He gestured again to the chair on the other side of his desk, eyes on Ferdinand. “Sit,” he invited.

Ferdinand broke out of his frozen posture only to flex his hands and rub at his wrists, eyes locked onto the dainty tea set gently steaming on Hubert’s desk. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, but his voice had lost its force and become something breathier.

“An attempt to speak your flowery, cloying language, that we might better understand one another,” Hubert said. “I would pour you a cup, but you would criticize my technique, so I had best let you serve yourself.”

At last Ferdinand drew the chair closer and set himself in it, though he did not lift his gaze from Hubert the whole time. “I do not doubt that this tea has been sullied from the start by mediocre selection of leaves and improper steeping,” he sniffed, reaching cautiously for the pot. “I would pour _you_ a cup, but you would tell me you prefer coffee to tea, so I will not waste a drop on someone with such poor taste.”

“Indeed, save it for yourself,” Hubert agreed, sweeping his hand to the corner of his desk for his abandoned coffee. “I have my own indulgence.” He took a sip of the lukewarm dregs and fought down a scowl.

The trickle of tea pattered against the porcelain of Ferdinand’s cup. “Why the sugar?” Ferdinand asked as he poured. “Surely it is not for someone as bitter as you, and you know I do not take it with my tea.”

“I wouldn’t remember such an irrelevant detail as that,” said Hubert, looking directly into his coffee.

“Yet you remembered my favorite blend.”

“Is it?” Hubert set his cup aside and watched himself idly turn it in place. “What an unfortunate coincidence.”

He continued toying with the cup, pointedly forcing his eyes upon it, until he no longer felt the burn against his face of Ferdinand’s unwavering eyes searing into him from across the desk. It was a lengthy pause.

Finally Ferdinand lifted his cup, only to halt with the tea an inch from his lips. “It is poisoned,” he guessed. “That is your ploy?”

“If I wanted you dead, I would have had ample opportunities to kill you more quickly and confidently,” Hubert sighed. “Drink your tea, Ferdinand, and share with me this letter from Bernadetta.”

He took the sip first. “So you did not order her to write it?”

“Pretend for a moment that I did, and triumphantly point out to me all of my errors in execution for the sole purpose of gloating to maintain some kind of victory over the one who has you captured and disarmed in his control.” Hubert took another sip of his coffee.

Ferdinand put his cup back on the tray with a small rattle, shoving one hand into the breast of his coat from above where those treacherous buttons began. “Do you or do you not maintain that it was you who is responsible for the letter and Bernadetta’s disappearance?”

“You seem to have made up your mind on the matter,” Hubert said. “Why bother asking?”

“Because I _know_ you, Hubert, and though I may not trust you, nor do I often understand your actions or motives, I know that you are not toying with me for no reason.” He drew a single sheet of paper from within his coat, folded in thirds, and slammed it flat to the desk in front of Hubert. “If you are trying to draw information from me, then you may have it. But you must give me what you know, as well. If Bernadetta is missing and it is not your doing, then this goes beyond our petty arguments, and even beyond the war you are waging upon the rest of the world.”

His hands were braced against the desk, head hung low enough to call it a bow, golden-brown eyes locked onto Hubert with a plea. Hubert, however, was staring at the letter that Ferdinand had presented him. Aside from Bernadetta’s signature and her cordial _Dear Ferdinand_ at the top, he read none of the content, not keen to know what sweet words one might have for the other in the time Hubert had missed since the academy. Instead, he folded the letter back up to join the severed halves of the seal that Ferdinand had broken so carelessly. The shape of the wax had worn dull with the heat of Ferdinand’s chest, and bits were scraped or fallen away, but the symbol was unmistakable to someone who had seen it so many times.

“This is not the seal of House Varley,” he said icily.

“ _Hubert_.” Ferdinand’s grip was tight at the edge of the desk. He waited with a glare for the answer that Hubert had not given.

Then the answer was not yet visible on his face, although it was only a matter of time. For fear of showing not only his hand, but his heart, Hubert had to rise and turn his back to Ferdinand so swiftly that it made his cape billow behind him. Not once in five years had he slid the lower pane of his window upwards to let in the stench of the city, but he did grip its top edge on occasion to steel himself, though never before in the presence of anyone else, and never so tightly. He beat down the quivering grimace that had stretched back his lips, and shook his head of thoughts of Bernadetta in their clutches, with the same scars on her hands and arms as young Lady Edelgard, her hair turned white as bone—

“Hubert, what is the meaning of this?” Ferdinand yelled. “I ask you to _tell_ me what you know!”

“I know nothing,” Hubert ground out, squeezing his eyes shut against the sting of sunlight. He thought of Lord Arundel, of the librarian Tomas, of Monica von Ochs—then of the tea blend, of the untouched salt in the sugar jar. Small mercies, this was without a doubt Ferdinand von Aegir before him. If Hubert’s guard was slipping, at least it was in front of someone—surely it was treason to think this of an enemy of the Empire, instead of their pledged ally— _safe_.

He did _not_ know that they had taken her for their horrible blood experiments. Lady Edelgard was the final product of their efforts, and their ultimate success, if they believed her allegiance to them—which, he had made sure, they had no reason to doubt. Even if they suspected Her Majesty’s eventual betrayal, there was no logic to making Bernadetta the next avatar of their revenge. Though next in line to lead her house, she was a political throwaway next to the likes of the emperor. On top of that, wrangling her sensitive personality into following their schemes would prove to be a task much more arduous than imbuing her with a second crest.

That strain of logic was enough to loose his squeezed-bloodless fingertips from the window, and to release at least some of the breath locked in his chest. He turned back to where Ferdinand had been sitting, only to blink up and find the man standing inches away, face pale, one hand raised at the height of Hubert’s shoulder.

He had grown taller since their monastery days.

“Back,” Hubert spat, all but shoving him away as he slipped off to the side to trace those well-worn paths his shoes had cut into the rug from years of pacing. “Quiet. I need to think.”

“Do not leave me in the dark!” Ferdinand protested. “You look as though you have seen a ghost, Hubert! That seal on the letter, do you recognize it?”

“Yes. _Quiet_.” Hubert waved a hand toward the tea still undrunk, but was too busy with the words in his head to form any aloud about that half-thought.

Two possibilities were clawing their way forward in his head simultaneously, each drowning out the other. He swept one aside for later with a wave of his hand so that he might concentrate on them one at a time. First to consider was the purpose of Bernadetta’s letter. Without more information, he could not say whether Ferdinand was the final goal, with Bernadetta as a lure, or simply another in a string of trophies, but he was surely a target. Unlike Bernadetta, his political prestige was something substantial. With the right guidance, pretty praise, and horrible human experimentation, he could be weaponized into an usurper of the throne, and then easily transformed into the mindless puppet that Lady Edelgard refused to be.

But there were facts to ascertain first. “The letter was addressed only to you,” Hubert said. “Did you not share it with our other former classmates? Were they not alarmed?”

There was a clink of a teacup settling back into its saucer. “They were. Some less so once I had disclosed the contents of the letter,” Ferdinand said. “We were in agreement that the whole scenario seemed suspicious, but—”

“But you were the only one we found looking for her,” Hubert said. “Why is that?”

“Our forces are—” Ferdinand began, then clamped his mouth shut. The china made a slight scraping sound with the jitter of his hands. His cheeks turned redder the longer Hubert needled him with a probing stare and a sharp smile.

“Either too limited in number, or planning for an attack soon,” Hubert finished, striding back to the desk for a pen to jot a note down at the edge of one of his papers. “My intent really is only to unravel the mystery of Bernadetta’s disappearance, I assure you, but it was most gracious of you to offer more.”

“You are a monster,” Ferdinand growled.

“No, you are simply an idiot.” Hubert set down the pen after scribbling cursive-like nonsense with a jittering hand. It was more than likely that he had found redundant intelligence, since it had already been exploited by the Empire’s allies to draw out Ferdinand alone and vulnerable. “Your habit of jumping to conclusions may have saved your skin this time, since it led you into my net rather than to House Varley as the letter instructed. The trap that awaited you there might have made a monster like me look downright angelic in comparison.”

Ferdinand narrowed his eyes, but they fell back to his tea. “You still have not told me who is responsible for this,” he grumbled as he lifted his cup for another sip.

“I have a guess, but I wouldn’t dare accuse them until I know why they would target the likes of you or Bernadetta,” Hubert said. “First I will have an envoy sent to check in on Count Varley.”

“Is he your suspect?” Ferdinand asked gravely.

“No. He is his own horrible species of monster, to be sure,” Hubert muttered, gazing towards the window, “but he is nothing compared to what we may be up against. In the meantime, we will see about scheduling your execution.”

A fine film of fruit tea stained the front of his desk when it spewed most inelegantly from Ferdinand’s bewildered lips. “My _what_?” he choked.

“If you are to have any chance of survival during your stay in the capital—which _is_ where you must stay until this issue is resolved,” Hubert said flatly, “none must know that you are here, or your life is as good as forfeit. An execution should cover your trail nicely.” And, with any luck, it would prompt the objections of a certain party and confirm their interest in the von Aegir heir.

He liked the look of trepidation in Ferdinand’s eyes as the sentenced man worked up the nerve to clarify, “A… _falsified_ execution.”

Hubert managed half of a smile. “To my great disappointment,” he sighed. “Finish your tea. I have one more matter to think on.”

He pulled it back into the forefront of his mind by plucking it up with his hand from where he had left it earlier. Certain blood experiments _had_ occurred after the massacre of the von Hresvelg children and Her Majesty’s tragic survival. Months before the fall of Garreg Mach, Flayn had been kidnapped for her rare major crest in a feat so brazen it lost Lady Edelgard the opportunity to communicate with her most powerful general without sneaking away from the monastery grounds. The blood they had taken from her fueled the rampage in Remire Village shortly thereafter.

“You bear only a minor crest, correct?” Hubert murmured. “Bernadetta, as well. Does it still enable you to use a Hero’s Relic?”

“A minor crest is still no small blessing,” insisted Ferdinand, setting down his empty teacup and saucer. “Mine is the Crest of Cichol, and Bernadetta has the Crest of Indech, I believe. There are no Hero’s Relics for our crests, since they are rare crests passed down not from the Elites, but from two of the Four Saints.”

The Crest of Cethleann from Flayn made a third. Hubert did not enough for liturgy to remember whether Seiros was the fourth, or if there had been another. He was seeing enough of a pattern already without needing to delve into holy texts.

“Your execution will have to be this afternoon,” he seethed, then shook his head. “No, there’s no point—we will be traveling more quickly than the news, with any luck, though the question remains whether the destination will be House Varley, or if this will be the contrived circumstance that finally opens the Empire’s road to Shambhala.”

“To _where_?” Ferdinand asked.

Hubert could not remember when he had started pacing again, but here he stopped to look at Ferdinand. Divulging secrets about Those Who Slither in the Dark to enemies of the Empire was tantamount to sedition as long as they were in this turbulent alliance. Not only that, but it would be an excruciating affair to fill in someone who had not even known that, before Lady Edelgard became the _de facto_ crown princess and thus Ferdinand’s supposed rival, she had had ten siblings and chestnut brown hair.

But Hubert knew Ferdinand, and Ferdinand claimed he knew Hubert. On the surface, it seemed a bold assertion, but for all that Hubert teased at Ferdinand’s small wit, he remembered that their academy arguments had persisted because Ferdinand clawed _deep_ —deeper than Hubert had been willing to let him when he was trying to plot a coup between classes. Ferdinand was nothing if not tenacious, if only by way of relentless optimism. The two were brutal opposites, to be sure, but when opposites _knew_ each other, they had each other’s strengths.

Primarily, though, Ferdinand had a bright target painted on his back, and that was a tool Hubert wanted to weaponize. “Pour yourself another cup if you wish,” he said, returning to the desk. “We have much to discuss.”


	2. A heart breaks with a deafening sound in the silence left behind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back at it again with a lyric from Lo-ghost's [Lay Your Hands](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/lay-your-hands). Please consider supporting them and other Bandcamp artists today (Friday March 20, from midnight to midnight PST) by purchasing music while Bandcamp has a zero-commission fee promotion in support of artists that may be losing funds from canceled gigs due to COVID-19 prevention measures!
> 
> (Was it always "Lay Your Hands"? No, you're not losing it, I just had an epiphany about my chapter layout that made me realize I should have swapped songs for two of my chapters ages ago. Whoops.)
> 
> Without further ado, enjoy the chapter affectionately subtitled "I am Ferdinand von Crier", where I make Ferdinand fucking lose it and in so doing I experience catharsis.

Of all the places that Ferdinand imagined he would end up when he was told by his Empire captors that he would be marched to Enbarr at dawn—

Well, he had never _expected_ to find himself in Hubert von Vestra’s palace bedroom. He could not help that he had a very broad imagination. On a prayer, he had surrendered himself with his name and title to the soldiers circling and outnumbering him at Merceus, hoping to become a prisoner of war rather than a casualty. When the fort guard received a return missive from the Minister of the Imperial Household with the unexpected instruction of not only mercy but also immediate transport to Castle Hresvelg, Ferdinand’s curious mind naturally endeavored to find reasons why. It was neither his fault nor his intent if his thoughts may have wandered here, unbidden, in those dull, aching hours as he marched with bound hands alongside soldiers on horseback all the way from the fortress to the capital. The circumstances had coincidental, but striking similarity to the beginning of a contrived plot of risqué novels that trivialized the solemnity of war for the sake of romantic titillation—stories that no self-respecting noble would deign himself to read, obviously.

Anyhow.

In short, Hubert wanted to keep Ferdinand's presence secret from everyone else in the palace. The best place to hide him was in Hubert's own quarters, so, against all odds, there he was.

The window treatments were made of the same heavy, dark fabric as the adjoining office, swallowing any light beyond them to plunge the room into near-total blackness. Even when Ferdinand ventured to draw back the curtain with a cautious hand—he had the sense that something might bite at him if he touched anything in the room—the sun did not carry far. The varnish on the wooden furniture and flooring was dark as pitch, and the only pops of color oscillated between deep burgundy and muddy aubergine. Hubert's bedspread only got as light as charcoal grey. Its blankets were tucked and folded neatly but not crisply, just rumpled enough for Ferdinand to imagine Hubert slinking into his chambers well after midnight, falling atop the bed without changing his clothes, and rising before the sun to begin the cycle again, just like Ferdinand’s memory of the footsteps outside his door in the academy dorms in those early days of the school year when the unease of settling into a new bedroom made him startle awake at any unfamiliar sound, until those footsteps became routine enough to melt into the spaces between his dreams, that the night felt empty without it when Hubert followed Edelgard to the Empire. The bags under Hubert’s eyes were deeper and darker now than they had been back then, enough that Ferdinand could also imagine the bed going untouched for days at a time.

See, he really did imagine a great number of things, all without meaning to. He had been in the room not yet a minute when all those silly ideas came to mind.

Meanwhile, almost within earshot, Hubert still had a great number of matters to attend to, both in the tying of loose ends among his usual administrative affairs as he prepared for a sudden leave of absence, and in the organization of their imminent expedition. Through the door connecting office and bedroom, he heard Hubert rattling off demands to the servant who came to collect their tea tray: an emergency tax levied against the Varley house for exactly twenty thousand three hundred ninety-one gold with expedited delivery (an absurd sum, no doubt some sort of code), cancellation of all his upcoming events, travel preparations of two mounts along with a scant handful of soldiers requested individually by name, the Emperor’s detailed itinerary for the next two days—

The Emperor. It was bizarre to think that Ferdinand had come all the way to Enbarr and would never set eyes on Edelgard, on Hubert’s orders of secrecy. Had Hubert told him that intention an hour ago, he might have felt relief at the prospect. Now his head was heavy with more knowledge than it was prepared to hold, swelling into a headache that started at the temples, reached across his brow, and anchored down in his jaw. Twisting in his gut were the gaps in Hubert’s explanation filled with his pinched, pained expressions when he came to details too terrible to recount. “Suffice it to say,” he had concluded, in a tight voice Ferdinand had only heard from him once before, when he had been dripping with his own blood on a battlefield, “that the cost of Lady Edelgard’s immense power was the luxury of being able to change the world through a series of peaceful actions. She has been robbed of that time.”

There was still a sense of relief to know he would not see Edelgard, but it intermingled with nausea. He had come to terms with her death some time ago, when sleepless nights had him composing a treatise in his head on how the only way to depose a tyrant who refused reason was to start negotiations once her blood was on the floor. The way Hubert spoke, he wondered whether she would last long enough to meet a violent end, or if she would waste away before the war ended, never living to see her vision for the future to take hold, but believing so strongly in it that she would spend the rest of her scant remaining years to ensure it for the rest of the world. Goddess knows he did not need any more nagging thoughts of guilt and doubt lingering in the back of his mind while he fought against the armies of his homeland.

“Why did you not come clean about this in the first place?” Ferdinand had asked. “I understand now why Edelgard would choose violence. If you are being manipulated by Those Who Slither in the Dark into doing their bidding, then why not instead seek help to defeat them, rather than plunge the world into the bloodshed they demand?”

“It is not manipulation, it is diplomacy,” Hubert had corrected. “Are you so keen to forget that the absolute destruction of the Church of Seiros is our _mutual_ desire?”

Hubert filled the silence that followed with a slowly growing sneer. He had always taken great pleasure in making Ferdinand uncomfortable with the cold depths to which he would sink to achieve his—no, to achieve _Edelgard’s_ goals. Nothing he ever did was for himself. He had no claim to his own ambitions; they were all the possession of another.

Ferdinand was not silent out of shock for the Empire’s blasphemous motive. He was silent because he felt another seed of doubt sprouting in his gut. He—and he was sure he was not alone—felt no particular attachment to the Church of Seiros. By the time he enrolled at Garreg Mach, he was already acclimatized to the power the Church held over the continent. He considered this overseer a necessary central power to keep peace between three nations. After Lord Lonato, Miklan Gautier, and the orders from the archbishop (flattened and emotionless through the professor’s lips) to keep silent on what they had seen, Ferdinand first began to question the Church’s power. Unlike his more outspoken classmates—Dorothea came instantly to mind—he kept those thoughts to himself, but listened readily to what the others had to say. In the end, he only worried about the power the Church held in the future circumstance that someone less fair and just than Lady Rhea were to succeed her as archbishop and thus have that unbridled power at their disposal. As the future Prime Minister (he thought), he could work alongside the future Emperor Edelgard to partner with the future King Dimitri and the future Duke von Riegan to negotiate forcefully with Lady Rhea and the Church and impose new sanctions curtailing their power. In this fantasy world, where Edelgard had become Emperor in a more distant future than this one, where Dimitri was not executed before he took the throne, and where Claude was not fighting desperately just to rally the Alliance behind Riegan while Gloucester moved in for its own paltry political gain in the midst of chaos, there were open lines of communication and debate for months, such that the Church could express its concerns with giving up its centralized power. Having laid all of their grievances out across the conference table of negotiations, they would come to a peaceful and wise compromise of checks and balances among the countries and people of Fódlan—all people, including the commoners—to allow them to govern themselves without religion embedded in their laws, thereby making Fódlan a more welcoming place to the people of Brigid, of Duscur, of Almyra, and elsewhere beyond the narrow reach of the Goddess, while still achieving Her dream of peace. It was all perfect and sensible and, of course, noble.

The past five years often found him revisiting rulebooks of social law and making notes in the margins based on his new reality, trying to eliminate noble bias and isolate truth. Without a code to follow, he barely knew his way forward, but with the number of pages torn out of the books he had once followed like dogma, he wondered if he had ever known his way forward at all, or if he had been spiraling towards the same dead ends of inaction and indifference as his forebears.

In the end, he was fighting Edelgard for personal reasons. She was a tyrant, and she needed to be taken down. When Hubert hinged his biting remark on the crucial assumption that Ferdinand was fighting to restore the Church of Seiros, Ferdinand wondered who was really being manipulated.

In accordance with Hubert’s character, the one sitting area in his chambers was too cluttered with his own work to be serviceable for social calls. As luck would have it, one matter of his own work was some small black garment, positioned taut and open using the back of a chair to expose the fraying place where a seam had split open. That small rip was presently held closed by a short stretch of hand-stitching and then, where Hubert must have set it aside for a more important task, the still-threaded needle pinning the fabric in place. With minimal movement of the articles on the coffee table, Ferdinand found the small box that contained Hubert’s paltry sewing kit. It held no pins, not even another sewing needle, and of course the only thread Hubert stocked were spools of black; why would he ever need another color? Darning the hole in his coat’s elbow would be impossible, then, but with a clever ladder stitch he could sew a temporary closure with only a hint of black bleeding through, just to keep the tear from growing wider. To free up Hubert’s sole needle, he quickly closed the rest of the seam of that abandoned project with a quick but neat whipstitch and tied a fairer knot than the lumpy mess Hubert had at the start of his stitches. As was now his habit after losing so many of Bernadetta’s things from absentmindedness, he pinned the needle to his coat for safekeeping as he turned the garment inside out to inspect the mended seam and—

_Oh._

The smallclothes fell back to the chair when Ferdinand’s hands jerked open as if suddenly scorched. Perhaps he should have realized by its size and soft texture what he was sewing, before turning the thing inside out and seeing its two-legged shape. In his defense, who in the _world_ wore black smallclothes? (Hubert. Of course. Of _course_.) Goddess, to think he had taken off his gloves for this. And that damned imagination of his was at it again. No, he did not mean to call that to mind, absolutely not, thank you.

He removed his coat for his next sewing project, refreshed by the cool of a shed layer, and pointedly dropped himself in the _other_ chair. He clapped a hand to his breast for the needle—but no, it was still on his coat—and eventually calmed himself with threading and stitching for a spell of silence. There was the matter of coming up with a cover story for how Hubert’s, ahem, _private garment_ had gotten magically mended, but with any luck, the two would be out of each other’s hair before Hubert discovered it.

Ferdinand sometimes thought that he had used up all of his good luck in his privileged childhood and had now run out, and this was the result.

Hubert just stared for a moment when he entered his bedroom and found Ferdinand sitting absolutely shirtless at the coffee table, because he noticed threads coming loose on one of his buttons, and black thread was not ideal for the job but he would surely lose the button if he did not address it now, and so.

“Hubert!” Ferdinand yelped, clutching his shirt in front of his bare chest for some semblance of decency. “Have you never heard of knocking?!”

“To enter my _own_ —” Hubert pinched the bridge of his nose and, blessedly, shut his eyes as he, cursedly, closed the door behind him, trapping them both together in this space. “What in the world are you doing?”

“I had—nothing better to do while you—” Ferdinand pricked his thumb rushing through the last stitch he would make. It was not complete, but it would hold with a sturdy knot—he pricked his pointer finger. “There were, uh, _repairs_ I needed to make to my things, and so—”

Hubert opened his eyes again—Goddess damn him—and stared just aside of Ferdinand. “Where is my…?”

Ferdinand tried desperately not to follow his line of sight to the small puddle of black sitting on the opposite chair, absolutely not where Hubert had left it. Eyes on his sewing. Another knot would do it and he could be free of this.

Hubert seemed to glide when he moved across the floor. The billow of his cape behind him made him look like a stormcloud rolling in, ready to rain down and thunder.

“Hubert, please,” Ferdinand begged, if only to extend his life by seconds before its inevitable end. “I am nearly finished with this—button, would you wait outside another—?”

He did not leave, but at least he stopped, rolling his eyes. “Ferdinand, I have seen you in the sauna shirtless more times than I care to count.”

“This is different!” Ferdinand sputtered with the end of the thread between his teeth—oh, Goddess, how close had his mouth been, for lack of scissors, to Hubert’s _underthings_ —and the thread finally snapped clean. Shrugging on his shirt as rapidly as he could manage, he continued, “It is one thing to be in a place of communal bathing, that is—but to be seen like this in another’s bedroom is—”

Hubert cocked an eyebrow. “Entirely your own fault?” he finished, drawing nearer. “You were the one who decided to make yourself so at home here. Without invitation.”

Ferdinand had no reply to that, because Hubert was leaning over the other chair with a hand out towards the seat, primed to grab. He turned his attention fully to his own shirt, frantically but slowly doing up the buttons.

It took only a few seconds for Hubert, his voice pitched higher than usual, to ask, “Did you…?”

Ferdinand waited until he had finished another button before replying, “Did I what?”

Hubert cast a glare over his shoulder at Ferdinand, piercing but silent. Ferdinand stole chances to look away from it by turning his gaze down to his buttons any time he thought his resolve might slip. Eventually Hubert gave a heavy exhale and escaped to his closet, that scandalous something black balled in his fist.

So they both knew what had happened, and neither wanted to speak of it. Although Ferdinand deeply wanted to melt into liquid and seep through the floor at the moment, it was likely the best outcome he could have realistically hoped for.

“The destination is House Varley,” Hubert announced as he returned from the closet with a deep emerald green riding cloak folded over his arm, as if the cape on his shoulders were not ostentatious enough for him; perhaps he needed one that brought out his eyes. “If you had any _other_ activities planned for your stay in my personal chambers, you have mere minutes left to complete them. A servant will be in my office to escort you outside of the castle shortly. Coat on, gloves on, and hands behind your back.”

Ferdinand snapped to action as soon as he heard the order, which might have been embarrassing if he were capable of feeling more embarrassed than he was already. Once he had pulled on the coat, clasped it at his waist, and donned his gloves, Hubert was approaching with the cloak shifted from his arm to his shoulder, revealing a coil of rope. He looked pointedly at Ferdinand’s hands, which was evidently all it took for them to move into position behind himself. If Ferdinand did not fill this silence of Hubert standing behind him, the touch of rough fiber rubbing his wrists through his gloves, his imagination would start up again, and it would probably wonder why Hubert had rope stored within his personal chambers.

“What activities am I supposed to accomplish without the use of my hands, exactly?” he said as an attempt at a joke.

“I am certain you would manage to find something, somehow,” Hubert snidely replied, and Ferdinand hated the feel of breath shifting the hair at the back of his neck, smelling faintly of coffee. “That hopelessly persistent attitude of yours always was your best quality.”

“Why, Hubert,” Ferdinand laughed, “if I did not know you better, I might call that praise!”

“I’m hardly incapable of measuring a person’s merits,” he responded, beginning the loop of a knot, “no matter how detestable they may be in all other aspects.”

Ferdinand shifted his wrists just slightly, not enough to tamper with the length of rope wrapped around him, but to test its give. “This is much too loose,” he said upon discovering he could still fully rotate his wrists. “Surely you do not think me that fragile?”

Hubert’s hands halted. He said nothing. A second later, there was a yank so fierce and quick to tighten the ropes that it burned Ferdinand’s wrists through his gloves. He bit back a startled shout.

“I’m going to tie a slipknot around your thumb,” Hubert said in that bitter business voice of his. “Keep it tucked into your palm and out of sight. If the opportunity comes to free yourself for the sake of our mission, you need only take your thumb out of the loop and pull.”

Ferdinand definitely heard the words coming out of Hubert’s mouth when he said them. Whether he retained them was another question, one that he would no doubt answer with wandering rambles about the strange sensation of Hubert’s hands upon and between his own, powerfully foreign even through the two layers of gloves between them. To one another, they were as repulsive as opposing magnets. Making them meet required that precise forcefulness with which Hubert had now treated his hands twice today.

“If you’re to have _any_ hope of leaving this palace unrecognized,” Hubert said wearily, threading the slipknot up between Ferdinand’s palms to secure it in place around his left thumb, “you will need to cover that beastly head of yours and all its overgrown fur.”

With pursed lips, Ferdinand challenged, “You will have to cover it for me. I seem to have lost use of my hands.”

There was the whip and breeze of unfurling fabric. A small weight shrouded his head and draped across his shoulders, which shuddered with the sensation of Hubert’s hands gliding over them from behind, pulling the dark cloak into place and fastening its clasp at the neck. For that horrifying moment, he could feel heat at his back from Hubert standing so close, smelling less like coffee and more like—like miasma, dark magic incarnate.

“We will be traveling with a team I’ve hand-selected for occasions requiring discretion, but that is only intended to conceal from the other generals that your rather noteworthy identity was in the capital. You are still to act as if you are a prisoner of the Empire,” Hubert continued, feeding the train of the cloak through the loop of Ferdinand’s arms in order to expose his bound hands for the sake of appearances. “While we are in their presence, refrain from speaking unless absolutely necessary, and under no circumstances should you undo your ropes unless I give you the order.”

“It sounds as though I am indeed a prisoner of the Empire, not just an actor, if I am under your order,” Ferdinand said in bitter reply, “and you are ever-so-eloquently finding a way to tell me to shut up.”

“I would never use eloquence for such a message, for fear that my meaning might soar over your head. Shut up.”

The shove that hit Ferdinand’s back knocked the breath out of his chest. Without his arms free to balance himself, he took a deep stumble forward, but managed to right himself without tripping over a cloak that was inches too long for him (having been sized to Hubert’s abnormal stature, no doubt).

He was more graceful mounting the horse the Empire was providing him. At the same moment that Hubert (after glancing around, making sure none saw) held out a hand at Ferdinand’s elbow, intended as an anchor for balance, Ferdinand already had his foot in the stirrup and was starting to rise. He built momentum with his legs, from the push of the first in the stirrup to the swing of his second over the saddle, to pull him forward where his bound hands could not. Though he hit the saddle hard, prompting a wary snuffle from the cranky stallion adjusting to his legs and weight, he settled quickly and murmured reassurances to his new mount that he knew what he was doing, and that they would get on well soon enough even after a rough start. 

Remembering himself, he glanced back down to the ground, only to find Hubert was giving him a stare that he had never seen before, having evidently broken the limits to the amount of disdain the man could hold within his features. Utterly improper as it felt, Ferdinand would have to go the ride without knowing his steed’s name. Hubert might cast Dark Spikes on the lot of them if he asked now.

The journey to Varley from Enbarr was about as long as the one Ferdinand had taken from Garreg Mach to Aegir, where he had left his sweet old mare Roseantoinette in a stable of an old family friend to live out her well-deserved retirement if he never returned from Merceus. Her last ride had been a glorious one, at a breakneck pace of urgency that Hubert’s small company could not hope to emulate even when Hubert barked the order to make haste. Despite having no hands on the reins, Ferdinand was never the rider lagging at the back of the group; he made fast acquaintance of his stallion, as expected. Though each knew they were not a well-fitted pair—the horse too proud and willful, the rider, to be honest, much the same—Ferdinand quickly learned how to move in symbiosis with him, to defer to the horse’s judgment whenever he had the right instinct, and not to patronize him with long, cooing praises for those simple victories. That way, the few nudges and sharp calls that Ferdinand did give, the horse obeyed, even if begrudgingly.

The last time he had visited the manor of Count Varley, he had not been bound at the wrists, but he had felt as though he were. He had been in a carriage, not on horseback, and dressed in his finest, albeit picking petulantly at the itch of what fabrics nobles considered “finest”, while his mother sat across from him and swatted at his fidgeting hands. To think that so many years later, he would return to the same place, for the same girl, then betrothed but only now beloved.

He had only that vague daytime memory of what filled in the looming stone shadows he now saw across the estate. Not even the glimmer of candles in the windows lit the ghastly black shapes of buildings, so late was the hour when they arrived. The guard of the grounds who met them at the gate held his lantern high for several seconds before stifling a flinch when he recognized, “M-Marquis Vestra, forgive me, my Lord. What—to what do we owe His Lordship’s visit?”

Lantern-glow under his chin as he sat aloft his horse really was Hubert’s best light. “The Empire has collected something of interest to parties that I believe may be quartering within House Varley,” he said. “It seemed to have gotten lost in transit on its own. I thought I had better deliver the thing personally.”

With that, he turned around, looking not to Ferdinand but to his horse. An outstretched hand and a click of a tongue was all it took to beckon the stallion forward. Of _course_ such a stubborn steed was one of Hubert’s own warhorses—it took the same amount of exertion and restraint to work with them both. It also explained why the horse so readily followed Hubert’s lead in a way that had, in fact, embarrassingly little to do with Ferdinand’s skill at riding.

When the two riders were side by side, Hubert grasped at the hood of Ferdinand’s borrowed riding cloak and pulled it back. The warm glow of lantern fire illuminated his red locks and dug into the shadows of his grimace.

“We’ve captured Ferdinand von Aegir,” Hubert said, hatred seeping into each slow syllable of the name. “Deliver that message to whoever wanted him here.”

The guard mostly looked happy for an excuse to get away from the dreadful minister as he made his swift retreat. Hubert slid his icy glare to Ferdinand, who responded with a fiery one, but also with a slow, small nod. The plan was set, and where Hubert improvised, Ferdinand would follow. They had been enemies long before this war began, and so too had they worked together despite it. This song and dance was an old one, and they both knew the words and the steps.

When the guard returned, it was with a shadowy figure from whom he recoiled even more than he did from Hubert. Though Hubert did not visibly react, his horse shuffled her steps underneath him, likely feeling tension in his legs. The figure’s eyes flashed with an inhuman glint when the guard lifted the lantern to cast a shaky light on both Hubert and Ferdinand. Its smile looked like something undead. With a voice so withered that Ferdinand could not place it as male or female, it said, “Thales will be pleased by this gift from the Empire.”

“He is hardly a gift,” Hubert was quick to respond, eyes narrow. “Personally, I wouldn’t wish him upon my worst enemy. But, in exchange for finding and so neatly delivering him to you, undamaged, the Empire requests unfettered access to his holdings— _and_ that of any other resistance army generals you may have acquired.” He folded his arms, flashing his trademark sneer. “Only for the sake of gathering intelligence on our mutual enemy. Surely this is an acceptable compromise, Periander?”

The figure, once named, shifted back a fraction of a step. “I don’t believe you will find any _other_ generals here,” Periander lied—it had to be a lie.

Hubert gave a flat hum that suggested he believed the same. “Pity. Then you’re lucky I am so keen to be rid of this dastard.”

If Ferdinand thought Hubert’s hands were forceful before, they were brutal now: quick movements and constricting grips that wrested him from the horse, likely to seed bruises that would blossom by sunrise. As per Hubert’s order, Ferdinand made not a sound, but constantly tried to shake looseness into the pinching vise Hubert kept on his arm as they entered the castle grounds.

“I do come on two counts of business,actually,” Hubert said with his twisted version of cheer brightening his voice. “Not only to make this personal delivery, but also to make a visit to the dear old Count. It’s been too long since my last house call.”

“Count Varley would be delighted to receive Your Lordship in the morning,” offered the guard in a high, tremulous voice in the midst of raising the castle gate for them. Both Hubert and Periander shot glares at him as if he were interrupting. He did not speak out of turn, or perhaps at all, for the rest of the night.

“I’ve wrung what intelligence I could out of this one, without resorting to measures that might make him unsuitable for your needs,” Hubert continued, “but do tell me if you plan to subject him to more… _Agarthan_ techniques. I’m sure that could loosen his lips a bit further.”

Periander was a fright to behold in the castle light where the hooded robes did not conceal their grey and bloodless flesh, beady eyes, and hair whiter than Edelgard’s. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” they said with a smile and tone so similar to Hubert’s own that Ferdinand wondered, if he had been dealing with these—he hesitated to call them _people_ —for so many years, whether perhaps Hubert had learned his dark ways from their example.

“You really are lucky I’m choosing to cooperate with you,” Hubert muttered. “Remember it is the _Emperor_ now who holds the fruits of your labor and thus the bulk of your power. Not you.”

Periander’s cackle was drier and darker than Hubert’s by far. Ferdinand swallowed after the chill that ran down his spine, and he felt Hubert’s grip on his arm tighten further, surely white-knuckled underneath those gloves of his.

Ferdinand’s knowledge of the manor layout quickly became useless when Periander led them to a descending staircase behind a heavy door barred from the outside by a slab of stone so large it took two to lift it. Hubert’s soldiers were prohibited entry, though they easily outnumbered the single remaining dungeon guard even when joined by an increasingly nervous gatekeeper. The other guard lit the stairwell by torchlight, walking at the head of the remaining party. The descent was as long as that of the dungeons of Aegir, but the stink of must in the air was far thicker. Ferdinand tried to steal a clue from Hubert’s face as to how long he would have to endure this rot, but Hubert’s face was blank. Grim as always, and firm as if carved into alabaster, but blank.

The cells at the bottom of the stairs were few. Hubert had to restrain Ferdinand from lunging forward to peer through the bars of each one, looking for, Goddess forbid, the small shape of dear Bernadetta left to fester with the mildew creeping across the dank stone walls, but she was nowhere to be seen. It was an empty cellar, until the dungeon guard unlocked a door and Periander gestured inside with a sneer.

Hubert shoved Ferdinand forward hard enough to stagger him again. Here he stood, in the center of three men, hands falsely bound, a secret ally at his back. He glanced around, waiting for the signal, whether this was the moment to strike—

And another hard hand gripped his shoulder and pushed him into the cell. Barely keeping his feet underneath him, he turned around to see the dungeon guard barring the door in his face and locking it. And Hubert and Periander were just beside him, wearing dark, identical sneers.

_Oh._

Something in his chest plummeted downward, something treacherous. “Hubert,” he mouthed, lacking even the breath to whisper.

And Hubert began to chuckle, that dark chuckle of his, as he turned nonchalantly away and strolled back to the stairs. His laughter grew as he retreated, ringing in the eerie echo of high stone walls, as Ferdinand called out his name again, gripping the unyielding bars, his lungs filling with mold and moisture and death, _yelled_ his name, and Hubert was cackling.

“The fool played into the trap until the very end,” he heard Hubert laughing to Periander. “I convinced him I was a double agent through almost no effort at all, and that was all it took for him to walk directly into—”

There was a slam of the door at the top of the stairs, then the grind of the stone bar sliding into place to shut it, and Ferdinand heard nothing more. He sank slowly to his knees, then to his side. The world was too blurry for the stone floor against his cheek to feel icy cold or damp with filth. He did not know which would happen first, whether mold would crawl up his body and devour him, or Hubert’s deceit would eat him from the inside out.

It was foolish, utterly foolish—first to have _trusted_ Hubert, and now to let himself be hurt by that broken trust. Hubert had always been the enemy, had been since even before the war. He had frustrated and confounded Ferdinand since the day they met—how could Ferdinand ever have believed in such a joke, that he _knew_ Hubert well enough to know when the man was telling the truth? That he ever knew the man who had him captured alive, served him southern fruit tea, clothed him in a luxurious cloak from his own wardrobe—and this was where the moisture started biting at his eyes, that the pieces of the man he thought he knew were all fabrications, figments of a grand scheme to have him out of the way, out of the war, out of the picture with dear, sweet Bernadetta, still in peril, somewhere yet to be rescued, and here lay useless Ferdinand, stupid enough to walk directly up to the gallows just because the executioner smiled at him and promised that he would loosen the—

Ferdinand slipped his thumb free of the slipknot pressed between his palms, like a spurned child desperate for a shred of love from one who had abused him time and time again, with shimmering hints of sweetness between episodes of hurt. When he pulled his wrists apart, the knot unfurled and gave him the precious inches he needed to wriggle his hands free. But his hands were no use now, locked behind bars to waste away in a dungeon underneath House Varley. His hands would _never_ have been useful, separated from his weapons. It was another easy gamble Hubert had made to gain his trust. All his hands could do now was catch the shameful tears spilling from his eyes, mourning the loss of something he had never had in the first place.

His grief only had a shape because there was still hope left to frame it, hope that Hubert could not even do him the mercy of killing altogether. Goddess knows Ferdinand could not oust it from his own heart, no matter the hours that passed, hazy and dreamlike with the exhaustion that finally caught up with him after sleepless days and nights of travel. He was too tired to cry, and yet the tears wrestled their way out of him, taking with them the last of his will to fight, but still not his Goddess-damned hope. “I hate him,” he said to that empty jail cell, his inevitable tomb, again and again, shouting it, shrieking it, sobbing it, and never meaning it enough to stop wanting to believe in him. Not because he saw no other way out—just because he wanted the real Hubert to be the Hubert he thought he knew.

His breaths were no longer shaking, but haggard with weariness, and his face only sticky with the residue of tear tracks, when he next heard anything other than himself. It was the shift of stone of the cellar door, and when it opened, hushed voices trickled in. Ferdinand hated his ears for straining for Hubert’s voice among them, but he found it.

There were two sets of steps descending the stairs, one of them from a pair of armored boots, the other just like the ones that used to skulk past his monastery dorm. He had already propped his cheek and the rest of his lifeless body against the stone wall beside him; now he pushed into it, forcing himself to stand despite the sore weakness creeping into his legs from the march that must now have been a full day ago. Hubert had never fed him when they took tea together, turning him into the weak, pitiful thing barely standing before him as he approached the cell door with a smile.

“You look terrible,” Hubert taunted. “Didn’t sleep well?”

Ferdinand opened his mouth, baring teeth like a rabid dog. No words came out, just hot, rasping pants of hate to cover the hurt of betrayal.

“I know. I wish I didn’t have to see you again so soon, either.” Hubert lifted Ferdinand’s stolen rucksack. “But you only have yourself to blame, for concealing something so _very_ interesting from me.”

Ferdinand could not close his mouth enough to frown his confusion. All he managed was the small furrow of his brow. He watched Hubert’s hand dip inside the bag—

—and swirl with the sickly black of miasma—

—and thrust back out, to the guard standing behind him, knocking him to the ground with a wave of dark magic. Hubert dropped the bag and cast another suffocating cloud around the flagging soldier. That was all it took to snuff the life from him.

Hubert dropped to a crouch beside the body, snatching the spear from his dead hands. “We don’t have much time,” he said, the malevolent cadence gone from his voice, replaced by sharp, low monotone, and now he whirled to the cell door, lockpicks in hand. “Follow my lead. Kill anyone who sees us. I’ve learned where Bernadetta is being held.”

And meanwhile, all Ferdinand could get out of his gaping mouth was a breathy, “ _Hubert._ ”

Hubert glanced up from where he had two picks fiddling at the keyhole, and quirked a smile before he turned his focus back to the task. “You do look terrible,” he teased. “Is your _noble constitution_ so ill-suited to a single night in a prison cell? The guards said they could hear you screaming.”

“I did _not!_ ” Ferdinand sputtered, banging his fists against the bars, at just the moment that Hubert straightened and withdrew his hands. The gate rattled as it swung open.

Hubert stood before him, welcoming him to freedom with a smile—albeit a wry one—and offered him the lance. The hope in Ferdinand’s chest was hesitant to bloom, ravaged as it had been through that lonely, cold, dark night, but here it swelled and grew until his entire body felt full. He was weak still, lightheaded even, but now in a drunken, delighted way, dizzy with the return of the partner his wounded heart trusted that he had never lost.

Hubert clapped a hand on his shoulder and pulled him out of his cell when he failed to take a step forward. “This is a stealth mission, Ferdinand,” he said, still smirking. “You will give away our position in the shadows if you don’t stop _glowing_ so flagrantly.”


	3. A little bit cold, maybe a little bit jaded, but I’ve still got a soul—somewhere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics from Cavernous. [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/track/0PGTv1PCWm1eRSm1KJCjX2?si=BBkxNM4QRJiwtvh1UpclHg), [Bandcamp](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/cavernous-2).
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: canon-typical violence/blood/gore but also some medical stuff with implied needles. And abuse, probably, to be on the safe side. Sorry, Bernie.
> 
> Happy birthday, Hubert! Hope you don't mind if I make your life difficult in this chapter that nearly doubles the total word count of the fic.

There were few things in this world that Hubert hated more than improvising. One of them was staring at him like an oversized street urchin, bedraggled and smeared with filth from a night spent barely sleeping in a dungeon cell. Another was what he was relying on the aforementioned street urchin to help him eliminate from House Varley, via methods that they would have to come up with as the circumstances presented themselves, since he had lacked the luxury of time to come up with a plan beyond its start and end points.

Those two were the only things to come to mind. Then again, most of his mind was actively churning through possibilities and contingencies on the fly, leaving him with scarcely enough brainpower to focus on the present moment. The single brain cell he could dedicate to operating his mouth decided that the best way to communicate the first part of his plan to Ferdinand was to say, without providing context, “Take those clothes off.” The only color left in Ferdinand’s face after his rough night had been the blossoming black and blue of that bruise along his cheekbone, until now, when it flooded with crimson.

Hubert _hated_ improvising.

“Shoes and cloak,” he specified, after reallocating at least five more brain cells to the _apparently arduous_ task of composing dialogue. “I need you to wear his”—he gestured at the dead guard he had selected as the first victim of his half-baked scheme—“armored boots up the stairs. The guards open the cellar door at the sound of familiar footsteps.”

Ferdinand already had the cloak untied and swept from his shoulders, shaking his hair loose of it, by the time Hubert finished speaking. “And why this?” he asked.

Hubert snatched it from his hands to tie it around his own neck. “Because if anyone sees me with you, or sees me outside of this dungeon _at all_ in the next two hours,” he hissed, drawing the hood over his head, “the Empire may fall, but so will the Church, into the hands of Those Who Slither in the Dark, when they sentence the only man alive who is at all close to stopping their plots to a fate worse than death for violating our alliance.”

Human warmth lingered in the velvet when he drew it close to himself, a small comfort. Unfortunately, so did the stink of a prison floor.

As Ferdinand tugged off his gloves to unlace his shoes, Hubert crouched over the fallen guard to loosen the corpse’s boots. “I need your complete obedience in these next hours, Ferdinand,” he uttered, tugging at stubborn buckles. “I will say it again, to be sure it gets through your unbelievably dense skull: we are to leave no witnesses. We will kill _anyone_ who sees us, friend or foe. If you cannot agree to these measures—”

Ferdinand’s hands, ungloved, slipped over Hubert’s, and unlatched something so quickly and easily that Hubert blinked and missed it, but the boot was off. “You will leave me here to rot?” he guessed when Hubert forgot to finish, because all six of the brain cells working his mouth were suddenly focusing instead on the barest sensation through his gloves of Ferdinand’s thumb brushing along the back of his hand.

“That is hardly motivation for you to answer me honestly, which is what I need,” Hubert muttered eventually. “On the contrary, I will see you out of the cellar, but no further. The ruse we are creating is your prison break aided by a traitorous guard, whom I then killed in self-defense.” He nodded gravely at the corpse. “If you agree to smite all of Those Who Slither in the Dark that we encounter, those who jump to their aid, and any other unfortunate witnesses who get in our way, then I can offer you further assistance in freeing Bernadetta.”

Ferdinand’s head snapped up from fitting the boots over his feet at the mention of her name, wide-eyed with worry. “Where is she? Is she in danger?”

Hubert rolled his eyes. “Her bedroom, so I suspect not, at present,” he said. “But the Count implied she was confined there against her will, not as a result of her typical social isolation. So, indeed, she needs her beloved knight’s rescue.”

Said knight had the nerve to glance aside, bashful and coy, with a smile trembling upon his giddy lips. “You must not tease me so,” he said quietly. “I do not know yet if I have earned the honor of being her beloved.”

“No?” Hubert raised an eyebrow. He grabbed Ferdinand’s boots in one pinched grip as he stood. “Yet when first we reunited, you were so convinced I had stolen her from you. Was she never yours to steal?”

The shyness turned to a red fluster as he hurried his last foot into its new shoe in order to stand up to Hubert. “I would never claim her as my own, under any circumstances. She belongs to no one but herself!” he protested, arms out. “I only meant I did not want her to fall into _your_ hands.”

Hubert hummed with disdain. “So you maintain innocence and speak of respecting her autonomy despite seeking to control her behavior. How abhorrent.”

Ferdinand scoffed, “That is _not_ what I—”

“Be silent as we walk upstairs,” Hubert cut in, ignoring him and moving towards the staircase. “When the door opens, by whatever means we must open it, you are immediately to kill the two guards, and anyone else in sight. It is not enough to fell them with a nonfatal blow. These people cannot live to tell what they have seen. Do I make myself clear?”

Ferdinand glared his response, since they were already starting to climb the steps. Clumsiness with the poor fit of the shoes made his feet clunk as heavily as the gait of the guard in full armor. Hubert kept his breaths steady, drawing the hood of the cloak well over his head. As the door loomed ever closer, he held out his hand knuckles first, where brass plating was stitched into the fabric. It created the same metallic sound as a gauntlet when he struck the door exactly three times, a careful count memorized from last night. He held his breath for the whole drawn-out moment of unendurable silence between his knocking and the grinding of stone to unbar the door.

The shaft of light slicing into the dark stairwell first struck a sliver of Ferdinand’s face, centered on his fierce eye, hot to the point of molten. As soon as it caught the tip of his borrowed lance, he thrust the spear forward with the squelch and accompanying thick, guttural cry of a fatal wound.

There used to be a certain pompousness with which he carried himself in battle, focusing on technique and elegant form whether fighting in the training hall or in a bloody field of hostile soldiers out for his life. Hubert had watched that fancy footwork, those ballet-like pivots, and his tone-deaf grin with scorn—but something changed. He could not pinpoint exactly when it began—whether it was after seeing Captain Jeralt struck down by Kronya in her disguise, or the monsters swarming the monastery grounds, or Miklan Gautier transforming into a demonic beast before their eyes in grotesque magnificence—but Ferdinand did not smile in battle anymore, and there was no flourish to his precise lancework. But _precision_ , that he carried in full, deadly force.

After the fatal first jab, he kept the shaft of the lance wedged into the crack of the door. He and Hubert moved as one without words, without so much as a moment of eye contact, to ram into the back of the door and shove it open, overwhelming the single other soldier trying to shut the mutiny back inside. Ferdinand had the second guard’s sword locked with his spear before Hubert blinked the sudden wash of daylight from his eyes, even with the cloak hood shielding him. He crouched over the first guard, a foot on his neck, to confirm his death.

“Wh—what the hell?!”

Hubert snapped his head up to see an auxiliary guard from the manor entrance rushing into the room, spear in hand. In other words, the worst-case scenario: not only reinforcements, but a commotion.

That would have to be silenced quickly. It had been many years since Hubert last wielded an axe, but that was the weapon at hand—in the hand of the dead man underfoot, anyway.

It was common knowledge that steel axes were not suitable arms for anything less than an intermediate axe user. The few times Hubert had laid hands on an axe before, it had been made of iron, if not mere wood. It was never something Hubert put much thought into. Physical weapons never interested him enough to pursue so deeply, certainly not axes.

The reason _why_ novices were forbidden from wielding steel axes, Hubert very quickly learned when he hoisted one up for the first time, was because they were _much_ heavier.

He tried to lift and strike the approaching target all with one swing, but the weapon went wide with a lack of control. The blow meant for the chest instead hit the shoulder, but still had the intended effect of bringing the soldier to his knees. By the time Hubert could heft the weighty blade back up for a second attack, a figure slipped into the opening he had left on his right side.

The spear pierced through a critical opening in the pauldron exposed by Hubert’s first haphazard but crushing blow from the axe. Ferdinand trained his eyes on the final foe all the way through his descent to the floor before finally looking up to return Hubert’s gaze, his many lengthy locks strewn across his face in a disorder the likes of which Hubert had never seen anywhere near the nobleman before.

“When did you learn to wield such a mighty axe?” Ferdinand asked, a little bit breathless.

”I didn’t. I don’t have the luxury of choosing my preferred weapon.” Once he had ascertained their surroundings—three dead on the ground, silence and stillness in the vicinity—Hubert released the axe to rub the soreness from his hands before he set them to the next necessary piece of his plan: shutting and barring the dungeon door. “Those Who Slither in the Dark are masters of dark magic. They could trace any spell I cast back to its source.”

Ferdinand appeared at the other side of the stone slab when Hubert started—and struggled—to lift the massive piece. He questioned nothing, only lifted and followed Hubert’s moving, supporting more than his fair share of the weight. It was a welcome change from when he used to question any statement by virtue of its coming from Hubert’s mouth, whether a battle directive or an observation of the weather.

“This is why I am…” A flicker of a cringe crossed Hubert’s face as he found the words to finish his sentence while sliding the crossbar into place. “Heavily relying on your assistance through this endeavor.”

Ferdinand hummed, scrutinizing the spear he had tucked into the crook of his elbow. “I suppose you have not kept up your studies with the lance since Garreg Mach, either,” he guessed, not expecting an answer.

He crouched by the last body they had felled together and pulled its lance from its lifeless grip. After a moment’s comparison between his two weapons, he handed the second to Hubert, nothing but earnestness in his eyes.

“This is close to breaking from being forced into the door,” he murmured of the first. “I will hold onto it, should a spear provide a greater advantage in combat, but I have skill enough to use this primarily.”

He took the steel axe from where Hubert had placed it against the wall, then held both it and the lance in one hand. The other hand slipped between Hubert’s two on the new spear, first to shift the angle of the shaft, then to cover Hubert’s right hand and pull it further back towards his left, narrowing the grip.

“Prioritize strength over speed with this lance,” he said. “Although it is heavier than what you are used to holding, you must not let your hands creep up the shaft to support the weight. Instead, use the torque to drive your strikes for heavier damage.”

With that, he holstered his lance in an empty loop at his belt, then lowered to one knee to remove his borrowed boots. By that time, Hubert had regained his faculties enough to refrain from uttering any words of gratitude, Goddess forbid. “I don’t recall you being so adept at teaching when we were students,” he managed.

Ferdinand glanced up from loosening the first boot, his expression open and blank with the effort of recollection for a moment before it eased into a smile. “You are ever the master of the backhanded compliment,” he said. “But I shall spitefully take from you what flattery I can get.”

“I don’t flatter. I state objective fact,” Hubert said icily. “The fact is that you have just given me more cogent instruction in a matter of seconds than you did for three excruciating months of horrible partnership in the training hall.”

Ferdinand’s small smile turned into something sheepish with dimples and a soft laugh. “I regret to admit that I was not putting in an honest effort to help you, back then,” he confessed, shifting to undo the other shoe. “I was not keen to coach someone whom I considered my enemy.”

Hubert sneered. “And you do not consider me your enemy now?” he said. “When we are generals on opposite sides of a war?”

“For this moment of alliance,” Ferdinand said, “I must not consider you as such.”

Rather than put on his own boots, which Hubert had dropped outside the dungeon door, Ferdinand stuffed them in his bag as he sprang to his socked feet. He reached towards Hubert’s face with an open hand, then closed it around the hem of the cloak hood, and yanked it further down, so that Hubert could scarcely see more than the floor.

“You are recognizable by that sinister smile of yours,” he teased. “Take care to keep it covered. Now, which way to Bernadetta?”

The difficulty in getting to Bernadetta was not discerning her location. Her bedroom was in the main house of the manor, situated in the center of the Varley grounds for the convenience of the noble family’s comings and goings. From the front gatehouse, it was a short walk down a stone path through a lovely courtyard, aromatic and blooming with crocuses, snowdrops, and hyacinths to herald the coming spring. It was a literal walk in the park to find her.

The issue was that the house was guarded by Empire loyalists that Hubert himself had selected for the purpose of keeping the Count Varley under house arrest. Most would recognize him, and many might even recognize the son of Duke Aegir. To maintain the secrecy of his dissent, Hubert would have to slay his own soldiers. He was prepared to resort to such measures, but not keen on it.

They crept along the trellises and between the bushes of the ornamental garden until they came to the wide grove of fruit trees, its budding flowers too thick to see through from the windows that overlooked the orchard from the main house. Ferdinand, dusted with gold from the brush of pollen-laden blossoms, clamored up the tallest tree with the thickest cover of foliage. His white socks (shoeless for optimal stealth, he insisted) were dark with dirt, and at least two fledgling leaves had gotten caught in his long red curls, glowing with speckled sunshine of the afternoon filtering through the branches. Though he was only a small number of years younger than Hubert, he looked so boyish in such a state, freckles illuminated across his cheeks, a secret thrill rising in his eyes.

Hubert again reallocated his few remaining brain cells to focus appropriately on the more pressing matters at hand.

Ferdinand had taken this position to watch the comings and goings on an obscured passage Hubert had found in his “midnight stroll” of the grounds. The servants’ entrance carved a narrow sliver into the earth to reach the basement. Shielded on both sides by stone walls, the doorway could suppress both sound and sight of struggle. An hour after Count Varley’s Sunday brunch (which he took with extravagance, despite insisting that it would cause him undue hardship to spare a meager twenty thousand gold to the war effort—not that Hubert had ever wanted it for anything other than to necessitate a meeting between them), the servants would be scarce in the main house. Thus, Hubert and Ferdinand could sneak through the servants’ passages with minimal interference.

“There are two guards posted,” Ferdinand reported, while Hubert kept watch of the immediate vicinity. “Two swordsmen—no, one is a woman.” He lowered his telescoping hand from his eye. “What is the plan? Shall we disguise ourselves as servants to slip past the guards?”

“Not only would it be impracticable to obtain servants’ garb without first murdering two servants, but I also see little possibility of that harebrained scheme even working, in which case we will still be forced to fight, but without armor and without weapons,” Hubert said bitterly. “I understand your desire to find a nonviolent path forward, but it is simply not possible for us to take such risks. Lives must be sacrificed, for Bernadetta’s sake.”

Ferdinand’s jaw was opening wider and wider in indignation, until Bernadetta’s name clamped it shut. He snapped his head away as if stricken. It was with pain that he uttered, “This is the same philosophy that led you and Edelgard down the bloody path of war, isn’t it? That sacrificing lives is insignificant in the pursuit of your own goals.”

“Then, you would leave Bernadetta to a terrible fate at the hands of crueler enemies than even me?” Hubert challenged, folding his arms.

“This is not fair,” Ferdinand protested. “You are forcing me into an impossible dilemma!”

“ _I_ am not forcing you at all,” Hubert said, though he could not keep the smug smile from his lips. “These are simply the circumstances life presents us. Haven’t you heard the saying, ‘Life isn’t fair’?”

“Life is more complex than your black-and-white fallacies,” Ferdinand said. “I believe there is always a peaceful solution if we take the time to think of it.”

“If you can find the time in the day and the brain in your head for such things, I have no objections,” Hubert replied, pulling out the modest timepiece from his pocket. “We have now one hour and seventeen minutes to find Bernadetta _and_ make our escape. I give you no more than five of those.”

A dark look crossed Ferdinand’s sunny expression. “Such is Edelgard’s dilemma, is it not?” he said with soft reverence. “You choose violence because it is quickest, and you are pressed for time. Is she so desperate to see her vision come to fruition within her lifetime that she would cut short the lifetimes of others in order to see the world changed by her own hands? Does she not trust her cabinet to carry on her will—for _you_ , Hubert, to see it through to the end, even if she cannot?”

“No. We recall the Insurrection of the Seven,” Hubert said flatly as an answer. “You choose a poor opportunity for political debate, Ferdinand. Time dwindles.”

“What even is to happen in one hour and seventeen minutes?” Ferdinand asked with a jut of the lower lip that could only be called a pout.

“The next piece of my plan sets into motion to cover our trail.” Hubert held the pocketwatch where Ferdinand could see it and tapped his foot. “Less than one hour, sixteen and a half minutes now.”

Jolting with panic, Ferdinand crept higher into the branches, peering at the house. “A—an open window, perhaps!” he blurted, pointing too far upward to be anything at ground level. “It is the beginning of spring, after all, and they are letting in the fresh, warm breeze—”

“If you can find an open window on the first floor out of the sight of any soldiers, I will _consider_ that scheme.”

His pointing arm faltered and sagged. “Perhaps… if we were to find a vantage point on the opposite side of the manor—”

“In four minutes?”

“It—it cannot have been a full minute since you—”

“Perhaps not.” Hubert watched the last second tick down. “Ah. Now it has.”

“Then forget finding an open window—we shall pry one open, or break the glass if we must!” Ferdinand declared. “If we move carefully such that the guards on either side do not spot us, I believe there is a window just ahead, through which we may infiltrate the—”

“Ferdinand,” Hubert interrupted.

He had never intended to give the whole of five minutes away. Shame on him for underestimating the idealist’s ability to try for a mile when given an inch.

“If we infiltrate from the servants’ entrance, it will bring us to their passages between the walls,” he explained, keeping his voice slow and calm despite his exasperation. “We run the lowest risk of encountering anyone else if we can access those passages. Two innocent lives, and nothing more.”

Still Ferdinand firmed his grim expression. “One life at maximum,” he bargained. “If we can generate a distraction, at least one of the guards may leave their post to investigate, while we take out the remaining one. Or…” He held a hand to his chin and stroked along his jaw. “Is there a distraction alarming enough that we might draw the attention of both? Something that appeals to their humanity than to their duty—an emergency of some—Ah! _Hubert!_ ”

Hubert stepped well back when Ferdinand, grinning with dangerous delight, leapt from the tree to the ground, where he landed in a spry crouch that had Hubert’s knees twinging in sympathy.

“Do you know how to cast fire magic?” he asked.

“Not since I wore the mage’s regalia, which had the spell imbued in its gloves,” Hubert muttered with restrained bewilderment. “In any case, were you not listening when I told you I cannot use magic without the possibility of—?”

Speaking of gloves, Ferdinand was removing his. “No matter. You may yet be able to help,” he said, holding his bare hands out in front of him in a posture Hubert almost did not recognize, it looked so unusual on the knight. “You see, lately, I have been practicing—″

Before the first flicker of a flame could spark between Ferdinand’s hands, Hubert jumped first out of the way, then behind Ferdinand, gripping his forearms from behind to keep him from turning and pointing them at him again. “I’m not going to ask when, let alone _why_ you decided to study reason,” he growled, “but I _am_ going to ask _who_ taught you, so I can have them hanged for not telling you _never_ to turn your hands at someone when casting magic unless you intend to kill them.”

“Ah…” Ferdinand slowly lowered his hands, smiling sheepishly over his shoulder at Hubert. “Perhaps I, er, do recall the professor saying something of the sort?”

A few nigh-on unspeakable things happened next. Hubert’s eye, drawn by a change in hue, fell to Ferdinand’s flushing cheeks. At ordinary distances, a drift in eye contact of such a small distance, just one or two inches down the face, would have been a change in focus more mental than physical, with nary a twitch of the eye. The close proximity between their faces at this juncture turned such a shift into a perceptible saccade, if only for a quarter of a second. This was all entirely reasonable, and it was Ferdinand’s reaction to such a thing that was to blame.

Namely, by the time Hubert restored eye contact, Ferdinand too had dropped his, by a similar small but detectable fraction. Pale though he was, Hubert rarely showed color in his face, neither after physical exertion nor embarrassment (which were themselves rare occurrences). So the reason for this off-center stare could not be the same reason as Hubert’s, and something else must have caught Ferdinand’s attention.

It started with Hubert using Ferdinand almost as a mirror, taking stock of all of the things that made a face other than eyes, warm honey-brown and lashed with strawberry-blonde that glowed with the sunlight filtering through them. There were cheekbones, Ferdinand’s own coming in more strongly in his adulthood. There was a nose, where Ferdinand’s seasonal wash of subtle freckles sprouted in their fullest so far. There was a mouth, slowly easing out of a sheepish smile into something more relaxed.

And that was how Hubert found himself looking at Ferdinand’s lips and realizing that Ferdinand was returning the gesture, at a distance where that sort of look had dangerous implications. It struck him with a feverish chill, like the wave of nauseous cold that roils through the body when too much iced water hits the stomach all at once on a hot day and cools all of the blood rushing past it for a confused second. His hands had gone clammy and numb. While stepping back to put a respectable amount of distance between himself and Ferdinand, he rubbed sensation into his palms by, absolutely unconscious of his own volition, scraping them up the length of Ferdinand’s arms.

“Fire,” Hubert sputtered, and his veins flared with it, or he wanted to be consumed by it. “You intend to use that as a distraction. What are you planning?”

Ferdinand pulled at the sleeves Hubert had rumpled, and Hubert felt his hands burn anew. “I was thinking, if we were able to create a large enough blaze in this grove,” he said distantly, examining his own hands, “I believe the guards would be… caught off-guard, as it were, and come to assist.”

Closing his eyes, Hubert projected the proposal in his head, entertaining every possibility and contingency: whether one or both guards would investigate, if they would call reinforcements to the task, if servants were summoned to handle the crisis, whether a disturbance would cause someone to discover the bloody evidence of their prison break. Although there was no guarantee that the scenario would go according to Ferdinand’s plan, so too was there little chance of it going catastrophically wrong, as long as it was executed with caution. In other words…

“I’m loath to admit it,” he muttered, “but it’s worth a shot.”

Ferdinand lit up as if the sun existed solely to shine upon him. “I am still only a novice with black magic, I admit, but I believe I will manage well enough for this task,” he said, raising his hands with more than his previous caution. “Perhaps it is time for us to see how _your_ skills as a teacher have improved?”

Hubert’s lips went stiff. “I can tell you now that they have not,” he said firmly. “Magic is deeply cerebral, almost personal. I have no advice for you.”

“Then criticize me,” Ferdinand challenged, beginning to cast. “That is close enough to teaching, and I know you excel at it.”

It did the trick. After only a cursory glance at Ferdinand’s form, stiff and disjointed and all in the wrong places, Hubert had more than a few choice words for him. The greater difficulty was in picking where to start nitpicking. “Where are you even planning on casting the fire?” he asked after a short deliberation.

“Into that tree, straight ahead,” Ferdinand said, pointing with his elbow in an effort to keep his hands in casting position.

Hubert had been expecting such an answer. The way Ferdinand broke form in the middle of it added another bullet point towards the end of Hubert’s list of grievances. It was coming closer to a genuine lecture.

“No. That’s not possible,” he said sharply. “No one could cast fire in a tree. You cast it in your _hands_. Focus there before you focus elsewhere.”

Ferdinand looked down a bit cross-eyed at his hands, as surprised as if they had recently sprouted from the ends of his arms and he were just noticing them. In uneven bursts from left to right, the warm golden glow of a fire spell began to thicken properly around his hands.

“In _both_ of your hands,” Hubert corrected. “Do not think of them as distinct entities. They are a single location to which you are sending your magic, not two separate ones.”

Frustration wrought a crease between Ferdinand’s brows as his hands tensed with the effort of concentration and dimmed their light. “But they are at polar opposite ends of my body,” he protested. “How am I to concentrate on sending magic two completely different ways at the same time?”

“If you have to concentrate on it, that’s a function of poor form.” Hubert took a deep breath to steel himself before laying his hands on Ferdinand again: gently, on top of his raised shoulders. “Your position is correct, but you’re rigid. Tension blocks the flow of magic.”

He pushed gently down on Ferdinand’s shoulders until the resistance fell away. A swell of magic thrummed around Ferdinand’s hands.

“Your hands are just tools for your magic,” Hubert said, keeping his voice low while he was close to Ferdinand’s ear. “If you and I can put aside our differences to become tools that work together, there is no reason your own two hands cannot.”

Ferdinand exhaled heavily. Whether that last comment was the thing that made it click for him, or he made a conscious effort towards the one prior about tension, his form softened into something properly fluid, and fire swelled between his hands. Hubert did not have the chance to get a word out about projecting the attack before Ferdinand had already pushed it away with a confident sweep of his arms. Evidently he did not need any advice; the fireball zipped with stunning speed for a novice caster and struck the tree Ferdinand had indicated earlier right at the split of the trunk into its main branches. Flames engulfed it and hungrily climbed higher.

“You need to cast more to make enough smoke to grab anyone’s attention,” Hubert said, before Ferdinand could speak through the proud grin he had turned Hubert’s way. “Keep at it while I watch the guards and secure an escape route.”

Ferdinand gave him a look then that was hard to behold, let alone describe. His smile had gone calm and one-sided. The sparkle in his eyes had an entirely new and dangerous luster, as if he were seeing something that he thought Hubert did not want him to see, as if he _knew_ something. And all he said was, “Thank you, Hubert.”

But it was not as simple as that. Hubert’s work was that which was done in the shadows and behind the scenes. He had been born into a thankless job as vassal to an imperial princess with dreams that called for conquest, and he grew perfectly into that role like a hand filling a glove. He had never heard a word of gratitude from anyone other than Lady Edelgard in years. When she attempted to lavish such praise upon him, he always deflected it, for he was unfit to bear it in her presence.

He did not know what to do when, of all people, Ferdinand von Aegir thanked him. He just stared, and did not realize he was staring, until Ferdinand laughed at him, his eyes shining with that mischievous twinkle from the flames he turned towards to feed further, casting fireballs with ease. Hubert made as much noise with his scowl as he could to be heard over the roaring fire.

By the time Hubert found a thicket at the edge of the garden through which he could peer at the servants’ entrance, the smoke rippling the air over the grove was thick, choking black. The two guards had emerged from the cover of the basement-level entrance, their heads pointed towards the sky over the gardens. When one separated from the other, straying from the trodden dirt paths to cut straight to the disturbance, Hubert darted back to signal Ferdinand over to his hiding spot. The noble knight had never looked more feral than when flushed with the heat of the wildfire blazing at his back, pulling his gloves back on with his teeth.

“Are the guards approaching?” he asked with too much delight and far too much volume.

“One, at any rate,” Hubert muttered, waving him over with another stiff jerk of his hand.

But Ferdinand stopped in his tracks, face fallen, then firmed with resolve. He turned back towards the fire, held his half-gloved hands to his mouth, and shrieked, “Help! _Fire!_ ”

The guard who had already left his post would start running now. Depending on his sprinting speed, he could arrive in the next twenty seconds. No, he was close enough to pinpoint them by Ferdinand’s voice rather than run towards the drifting smoke. Fifteen seconds was more likely.

Hubert did not have the luxury of grabbing Ferdinand without catching a fistful of his flaming hair, as well. Ferdinand let out another yelp as Hubert dragged him into the thicket. His red coat and hair glowed as bright as the fire to the south, and the thunder of footsteps was growing louder in the west.

He clamped his hand over Ferdinand’s mouth before throwing himself on top of him and pinning him to the dirt behind the bushes, thick with the cloying scent of fresh blossoms laced too heavily with pollen. Ferdinand squealed hot breath into his glove.

When Hubert turned his head to the side, his mouth was close enough to Ferdinand’s mouth to speak in the barest whisper. “Camouflage,” he breathed, tugging the green hood to cover both of their heads. “Quiet.”

He could feel Ferdinand’s breaths go shallow against his hand as footfalls pounded closer and finally past. Hubert was slow to rise, more out of the need to respect his cantankerous knees than out of an abundance of caution. Ferdinand followed his slow, silent lead to a kneel, watching expectantly, until Hubert gave him an impatient nod and gestured him to his feet. Ferdinand all but jumped there from his crouch, then had the nerve to hold out a hand to help Hubert up. Hubert, of course, ignored it as much as he always ignored the click in his straightening knees, and led him to the vantage point he had picked out earlier.

He almost did not see the second guard before she disappeared from view at the opposite end of his small perspective from the entrance, racing into the gardens after her partner—because of Ferdinand’s shout, he knew. He refused to admit that direct cause and effect aloud, however, and let Ferdinand piece it together from his muttered, “Both guards gone now. Run to the entrance.”

Though it was only a short sprint in open territory to the unmanned entrance, Hubert watched their horizons and ordered Ferdinand to watch the windows. He only remembered he needed to breathe when he was panting at the locked door, trying to keep from breaking another pick in its keyhole as he forced it open. He could not afford himself the luxury of pride when, at the click of the door coming unlatched and creaking open, Ferdinand jumped down the stairs upon which he had perched himself for lookout and held out his hand to help Hubert out of his kneel. He had no way of knowing whether this speed came from general urgency or the threat of imminent discovery. He grasped Ferdinand at the forearm, a small comfort for his ego, and—before he could pull, Ferdinand was pulling him, with so much more power than he had expected, somehow, despite having seen yesterday in his bedroom how new muscle filled out Ferdinand’s chest more than he remembered from glimpses in the sauna. He all but floated into the air, upright before his knees had a chance to complain about it. Though he had let go of Ferdinand’s arm, Ferdinand had not let go of his, and pulled him through the door when he hesitated on his feet for more than half a second.

The cellar was dark, but at a glance, it was also empty. Even by the light of fewer candles than fingers on one hand, and under the shadows of reinforcing pillars and bracing beams holding the ceiling steady—wooden effigies of the serving class bearing the nobility upon their backs—Hubert instantly found the rickety stairs that led to the passages between the walls of the rooms upstairs. He grabbed a candlestick from the wall on his single-minded way towards it.

As spiraling and maze-like as they were, the servants kept the passages well-organized and even labeled. Hubert held up his light at a crossroads once they had climbed to the second floor, where even Ferdinand was forced to duck his head under the sloped ceiling beneath the gabled roof, and found a card pasted on the corner of a wall, detailed with arrows and symbols. A perpendicular zigzag with a line pointing backwards for the stairs. A faded crown pointing down the turn in the hall, probably to indicate the head of household, Count Varley. In a darker color, a drawing of a padlock had been added to his iconography, indicating his house arrest. A similar image in an even fresher black had been drawn next to what looked like, in context, a cartoonish representation of a hedgehog.

Hubert followed that arrow down the hall, picking up speed.

The hedgehog symbol appeared again on the door at the end of the hall. A pair of iron crossbars had been bolted into the door, extending outward beyond the frame to prevent it from pushing open from their side or pulling open from the other. The bolts were no match for Ferdinand with a hooked axe. After his lance finally splintered and snapped from wedging it through the crossbar and pulling, he tried the same with the axeblade. “Steel _is_ superior to iron,” he panted, bemused, handing over the first crossbar, bolts jangling loose in its holes now that they had been freed from the wood. Hubert laid it quietly on the ground, watching Ferdinand force his way past the second.

Once both crossbars were pried off the door, Ferdinand reached for the doorknob before Hubert could intervene. The door still did not yield, though, rattling in place when Ferdinand pushed against it. “The knob turns,” he protested, twisting it in his hands. “Could it be a deadbolt, locked from the other side?”

Hubert swept the candlelight over the door until he found the keyhole. Ferdinand took the candle from his hand without a word as Hubert fished out his lockpick, then quickly fished out a third when his second of the day immediately snapped. Even when standing at the last obstacle between them and their goal, Hubert felt sweat beading around a head that was consumed with obsessions about having only two more picks left in his pocket.

“I cannot see through the holes left in the door by the bolts,” Ferdinand said, fraught with just as much worry. “Are we sure Bernadetta is within?”

“Yes, and perhaps not alone,” Hubert muttered, nudging Ferdinand’s knees with his elbow. “Quiet.”

The mechanism turned and the deadbolt withdrew. Ferdinand flinched from the effort of holding himself back from shoving the door open immediately. Hubert tested the door slowly and cautiously, watching as it inched away from the frame, exposing the hole in which the bolt had been nestled, and—

Came to a dead halt against something on the other side. Hubert hissed a curse.

“Barricaded from _both_ sides,” he growled. “They suspected the servants would try to free her. It’s likely a shelf, or something equally massive moved in front of the door, if you cannot see light through the bolt holes.”

Ferdinand’s eyes went wide. “What now?” he whispered. “If it is just a shelf, you and I could force it to fall by brute force—”

“And risk the possibility of it falling on Bernadetta and crushing her.”

Even in candleglow, he visibly paled. “Then what are we to do?”

“Find another way in.” Goddess have mercy on his knees; they all but _creaked_ when he stood this time.

Ferdinand led the way in retracing their steps back through the dark passage. He pointed with confidence at a sun symbol on the card at the next intersection, then down the hall it indicated. “There is a sunroom on the second floor where the family takes tea in fair weather,” he explained. “It is too early in the spring—the room will be empty now. Through there, we may access the main hallways without being seen.”

“But you are prepared to kill anyone who does see us?” Hubert asked again.

The candle in his hand flickered, but Ferdinand’s resolve did not. “I will do what I must.”

Dust swam through the stale air when Ferdinand pushed the door open, swirling and filtering the afternoon sun that poured in through the screens that enclosed the room in the northwest corner of the manor. Just as Ferdinand had said, the tea room was abandoned for the season, with tables and chairs pushed to the edges of the room stripped bare of its textile dressings, folded in stacks on top of the furniture. Most importantly, it was devoid of people.

“How… _did_ you know about this place, Ferdinand?” Hubert finally thought to ask.

When Ferdinand turned back around on his way to the main door out of the sunroom, he had a pink tinge to his cheeks. “That is a longer story than we have the luxury to discuss,” he said shyly. “I hear no one in the hallway. We should act quickly.”

Why Hubert felt compelled in this instant to trust any part of Ferdinand, even something as small as his ears, was beyond him. He was surely beyond such slips in judgment. Yet he did not stop the fool from opening the door into what evidently was direct view of the door to Count Varley’s chambers, and therefore the guards posted outside it. They did not have the chance to finish the question, “Where the hell did you come from?!” before Ferdinand, bound to his word, charged at them to fight.

Tugging the hood over his head with one hand and gripping his stolen lance in the other, Hubert moved as Ferdinand’s shadow to cover him. There were only two opponents, their armor thin, but their weapons sharp. It was the perfect matchup: Ferdinand’s axe and Hubert’s spear against a lance and a sword, as long as Hubert kept the swordswoman from trying to take out Ferdinand with her weapon triangle advantage. He cut between their blades with his spear to wrest what dominance he could of his own over her sword, leaving the other guard, armed with a spear, to flounder against Ferdinand’s prowess with the axe.

Hubert’s first parry was unfortunate, to say the least. He had not forgotten Ferdinand’s advice about the placement of his hands, but the swordswoman was fast, likely trained as an assassin before hired as an imperial guard. Hubert had probably hired her himself. He held the spear with a hand at each end of the haft to block her swing with a clang that vibrated through his bones.

If the first parry was unfortunate, the second was catastrophic. Hubert slid his hands back into position as best he could in the short time he had before trying for a jab at the assassin. The thrust felt solid and sure in his hands—

Until the retaliatory strike came not from the sword he was watching, but from a boot raised above the waist, stomping on the butt of the spear. Despite his clenching grip, it snapped out of his hands with such quick ease that the opposite end smacked up into his jaw before clattering to the ground. He fell to it next, himself, in a botched attempt to dodge the coming sword. Something hot grazed his side.

The line of a blade’s edge was always something so unsettling to see. It was almost unrecognizable as a sword from this perspective, lined up with his body into something paper-thin. Or perhaps this surreality was all just from that warm, wet, burning, cold spot spiraling out from his chest, putting haze into his vision and sending fog through his thoughts.

He would suffer a fate worse than death if the shaking hand he stretched forward cast a miasmatic spell to stop the swordswoman from taking his life. In that moment, death seemed like the worse fate, somehow. That did not make rational sense. He tried to engage his brain, to make it _think_ right, to reason this through, to find some other way to keep himself alive just another day, if not for himself, then for Lady Edelgard’s sake.

The blade clattered to the floor. All that hit him was a spatter of red. Then her head hit the floor, too, before the rest of her body followed. Ferdinand stood behind her, axe drenched in the blood from her severed carotids. His eyes looked wider than usual, distorted by Hubert’s blurring vision.

“Be still, Hubert. I have you.”

Ferdinand’s voice was hushed, closer than he expected. There was a gap of empty time before this, maybe a second, maybe more, robbed of him by faintness. A tingling numbness flared out across the burning in his side where he had been skinned or flayed or halfway cut through, he could not tell from the loud, flashing feel of pain skidding uselessly up and down his nerves. He blinked his eyes until they found the right direction, but even that told him nothing, except that Ferdinand told him to be still because his leg was writhing and lashing through muscle spasms triggered either by nerve trauma or insufficient blood flow. The blood, his and the decapitated assassin’s both, colored everything in a too-similar dark red to make out the details, especially not when blocked by Ferdinand’s hands and the hazy white glow.

He closed his eyes and heard Linhardt sigh and complain, shaking his head. The numb tingle turned into something cool and soothing against the heat of his pain.

“Are you alright?” Ferdinand asked.

As soon as he spoke, Hubert knew there had been another gap in time, or perhaps a dream. “Fine,” he said without thinking about it. He opened his eyes, with clearer vision and clearer mind, to the wound in his side knitting itself back together under Ferdinand’s ungloved hands shining with faith.

For someone so utterly predictable, he really was full of surprises.

“What are you doing?” Hubert slurred.

Ferdinand leaned an elbow against Hubert’s shoulder when he tried to rise from the floor, making a gentle hushing sound. “There is nothing to fear,” he said softly. “Do not let my inexperience with reason worry you. I have been practicing faith for years now.”

“You… _fool_ ,” Hubert uttered, when no more appropriate word would come to his lips in time. “I have a full concoction in my pockets. I could have…”

“Then save it,” said Ferdinand, “for a day in the future when you are without my help. There—you are good as new.”

As if to make sure that this flesh were too, too solid, Ferdinand trailed those bare fingers of his along the spot above Hubert’s hip where new skin made a white slash against the sea of sticky red surrounding it. There was no way to keep from shuddering at such a touch.

“Can you stand?” Ferdinand asked, with a blood-smeared hand held out before him, palm up.

Hubert dropped his hand in Ferdinand’s. Ferdinand wore a kind smile, as easy as the way he pulled Hubert up to his feet and steadied him when he swayed. Hubert was in a daze that he could no longer blame on his injury now that it had been healed.

“You must keep the openings in your grip at perpendicular rotations from one another to prevent an enemy from forcing the lance from your hands,” Ferdinand said, demonstrating something or other with those cursed hands of his as he handed back Hubert’s spear. “When they are parallel and opposite, the lance can be knocked out from one end or the other.”

The words went in and out of Hubert’s head even with Ferdinand adjusting his hands into each of the described positions, or more likely because of it. Each touch from those bare hands transferred both blood and warmth into the backs of Hubert’s gloves. It was horribly distracting.

“Goddess’s sake, put your gloves back on,” he snapped. “We need to find…”

He turned his head up and down the hall—narrow, and lined with carpets and tapestries that quelled both sound and light. His sense of direction had been rattled as deeply as the rest of his head. Once he found the hung-ajar door to the sunroom through which he and Ferdinand had entered the hall, he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to retrace their steps and turns through the dark servants’ passages to find his way back to Bernadetta, until a now-gloved hand tugged his shoulder.

“This way,” Ferdinand interrupted, pulling him down the hall away from the Count’s chambers. “I remember it.”

She was two turns down the hall from her father, one past her mother. At that second turn, they came face-to-ashen-face with the final foes in this chaotic rescue. Hubert could spot Those Who Slither in the Dark at a glance after all of his too-frequent dealings with them, the way their flesh looked closer to bloodless, decaying corpsemeat than the matter of any living being, let alone a human. The pale inner elbows of the swordswoman, and the near-skeletal hands of the cloaked mage beside her, gave them away.

“Watch for dark magic,” Hubert barked, charging for the mage with his spear.

Though his robes were of a low rank, his innate power for dark magic exceeded it. He had the range to cast a spell Hubert knew well, even if he did not expect it. Mire distorted the floor into ripples of sludge beneath his feet and burned through his clothes down to his skin like cold, thick acid where he did not have the willpower to reject it. He trudged through the illusory swamp undeterred, gripping his spear tight, even if not at the correct angles. The weight drove the blow, just as Ferdinand had instructed, piercing through that inhuman flesh like a toothpick through gelatin.

By the time he had wrenched the spear free from between those dead ribs, Ferdinand had buried his axe just under the ribcage of his own assailant. As the body fell, he looked to Hubert, then to Bernadetta’s door. Hubert, however, looked just past Ferdinand’s heaving shoulders to the shadows crowding the other end of the hallway.

“Incoming,” he shouted, pointing in the direction of danger with his lance while he fished a lockpick from his pockets with the other hand. “Cover me.”

Ferdinand glanced behind him, then back to Hubert. He snagged the tip of his glove in his teeth and yanked. In the midst of turning toward the threat, he thrust his bare hand back to Hubert, aglow with white magic.

A calm, pure peace surrounded him, dense and aromatic, but refreshing, like cool mist. The residual slime from the mire clinging to the tails of his robes evaporated into black smoke off of the cloth, and then those wisps dissipated into the thick, white light surrounding him.

He had never had a ward cast on him before. A death spell came for him and fell dead in the air, like warm water thrown into the open air of a frigid Faerghus winter’s night and crystallizing instantly to ice before plummeting to the ground. Even that could not express the experience in its novel entirety. It felt like a comfort in which he had never allowed himself to indulge. It felt like simpler times, like the world before it was colored red with war and black with shadow organizations, like friendships forged without ulterior motives of alliance or contingency plans for eventual betrayals. It felt like—

Oh.

Like the warm, deep scent of fresh tea, surrounding the windowside dining table by the pond in the early morning, and emanating from a nearby dorm room in the afternoon. Like fancy words and earnest smiles that could be taken at face-value. Like a respite from the cruel ways of the world was contained within the small space of a single person.

_Oh._

Hubert shoved the lockpick in the keyhole so hard it snapped immediately. Even with the ward spell softening his spirits, panic jolted up in his chest. His heart churned through a feedback loop of feeling its own excitement and becoming more excited as a result. It was a panic without fear, a thrill.

Oh, _no_.

A black cloud enveloped all of Ferdinand except the cry he tried to choke back to keep quiet. Hubert had dark magic brewing in his palms to retaliate before he could form a conscious thought to remind him immediately not to do that. It was nowhere near a fatal blow to someone as tenacious as Ferdinand, not with one mage already bleeding out on the rug and the other clutching a half-severed arm after the cast. The miasma receded from his face first, pinched in agony, but if he had control enough to cringe, he would be able to down a vulnerary and strike back before the mage composed her next spell.

Just as Hubert would have been able to reach for his concoction, swallow a dose, and mend the gash in his side, if Ferdinand had not been there to heal him.

He understood it now, that strange matter of need blurring with want, that irrational, but deep desire to ease another’s suffering only a few seconds sooner than the other could do it himself. It was lesser than devotion—that he already knew well, felt every waking minute for Lady Edelgard—but it was still emotion he could not battle down with reason, not now, not while Ferdinand’s knees shook as he struggled to lift the head of his axe off the ground.

Throwing the broken pick to the floor, Hubert snatched up his spear and charged. He threw the spear more than he thrust it—certainly one way of letting the weight drive the blow—and ran the mage through.

“Hubert,” Ferdinand breathed, almost reverent. His eyes were round with awe as he stumbled forward, as if Hubert had just saved his life instead of just stepping in to finish an already-confirmed kill faster.

But was that not the greater kindness? Surely Hubert would have rushed forward to save the life of any temporary teammate, if only to ensure his own survival in the long run. This act was a favor, one given without recompense, or even expectation thereof.

No, the swordswoman beheaded by Ferdinand’s axe. He could count this as repaying his debt to Ferdinand, one favor for another. “I believe that makes us even,” he asserted, pulling his lance free. “You have a vulnerary?”

Ferdinand managed a nod, sinking against the wall while he reached into his bag for one. When he managed to open the vial, the cork slipped out from between his fingers and bounced onto the floor. He threw back a dose as swiftly as he could, yet still gasped for more breath once his throat could open for air again.

After plucking up the fallen cork, Hubert slammed a hand against the wall underneath Ferdinand’s arm to keep him from sagging all the way to the floor. With a dazed glance upward, Ferdinand shifted his arm from the molding on the wall to Hubert’s shoulder, the movement hurried and heavy. “Thank you,” he panted.

Those two words were not as horrid to hear when expected in response to a favor whose weight he could measure pressing warm against his back. “Watch the hall while I force this lock open,” he said as he led Ferdinand back to Bernadetta’s door. “Take the vulnerary in three doses. You will have the time.”

Ferdinand gave an exaggerated nod when he could not find the air within him to speak. The faint fog of miasma still rolled out of his mouth with every breath. The black clouds drifted across Hubert’s vision before they dissipated. He had forgotten how poor Ferdinand’s resistance was.

“Cough, and don’t cover your mouth,” Hubert said as he propped Ferdinand against the wall beside the door. “It’ll get it out of your lungs.”

Ferdinand’s elbow lifted anyway when he drew in a deep breath. It took him more effort to hold his arm back away from his face than it did to cough out the last billows of sticky smoke that gripped his insides. He held his mouth open a while longer, heaving out until his breath ran clear again, then closed his lips around the mouth of his vulnerary bottle for his second dose—many minutes sooner than a doctor would recommend, but only thirty seconds shy of what was considered dangerous, and nowhere near lethal. Once he had swallowed that down, he rolled his head towards Hubert, who had just finished scraping the snapped tip of his first lockpick out of the mechanism with his second.

“They were,” he panted, then gestured weakly to the bodies on the floor, “Those Who…”

“Yes,” Hubert said.

“Are they,” he began to ask, “as soldiers—merely tools of… of their leader? Or…”

“Trying to ease your conscience?” Hubert said snidely.

Ferdinand pressed his parted lips together firmly. His eyes narrowed on Hubert with that righteous fury of his, with something haunted behind them. And, like the open and honest man that he was, he nodded.

Hubert turned to the lock and let his hair fall in the way of their eye contact. “All of Those Who Slither in the Dark have given themselves over to dark powers obtained by inhumane methods,” he said. “There are undoubtedly some innocents who are forced to fight for their cause after being subjected to their experiments—”

He looked up at the face of Bernadetta’s door and allowed himself to think of the girl beyond it for the first time since yesterday. He had packed away those emotions when they sent his heart beating itself into a mad terror of horrible possibilities—but if he let himself admit the truth behind his most recent panic, he had to admit the parallel truth.

Ferdinand drained the last of his vulnerary in that pause, and still Hubert had not found his way back to his spoken thoughts. “What of them?” he asked.

“It is often a greater kindness to kill them than to leave them to the fate that Those Who Slither in the Dark have planned for them,” Hubert said, his voice flat and numb. “You have done the right thing. And we must prepare to do the right thing again, whatever it may be.”

The lock gave a resolute click when it opened. Ferdinand fell very still for a moment, the color draining from his face, before his hands snapped to his axe. He jumped from the wall as if it had burned him, and turned to the unlocked door as if it were the heat source.

“I am ready,” he said in a wavering voice that sounded anything but.

Hubert gave him the small mercy of a moment’s hesitation. He needed it, too.

The truth was, the possibility that had quickened Hubert’s heart most was that Bernadetta was not too far gone to save. That instead, past this door, he would reunite with a young woman he had once known as a girl, and for a moment, show her kindness and mercy in a world that always denied it to her.

The truth was, true as it beat in his chest, Hubert had a heart, and it knew how to love in more ways than his head could keep up with.

Her hair was still purple. Instead of the frizzy, bushy mess it had been in her teens, it ran sleek and limp down her neck, the longest layers ending in a blunt edge right above where the loop of rope skated around the base of her neck and dipped under the top rail of the chair back. There, the two ends of the rope twisted together, then split apart again to capture in the next loop a thin, pale wrist, chafed red from the strain of holding up an arm high enough to keep her hand hanging behind the chair, just beside the neck. A thin, clear tube, dotted with red inside, ran into the back of that hand.

Her other hand was bound to the back leg of the chair at her wrist, and her upper arm to the stile above that. Between the two ties swelled a bruise in her inner elbow, out of which a second tube snaked away, blood dripping down its inner length. Her ankles were buried in the white tulle of her dress, but they were no doubt bound each to the front legs of the chair. She sat in front of a bookcase, as expected, facing too far away from the opening door for her to turn her head toward the sound, not with the tight loop of rope holding her neck in place. The rear laces of her corset were loose, yet strained, cutting into the pale, rosy flesh in that exposed strip of her back from the top rail down to the seat of the chair. The splats running up the chair’s back parted in the center with just enough space to fit the ridges of her vertebrae between them. That was where her spine was nestled: strapped in by the corset, with the two middle-most splats wrapped in the laces, so that her back was forced ramrod straight between the wood.

They had tied her to a chair.

There would be _hell_ to pay.


	4. I want to fall in love, but I don’t know if I am safe with you—why won’t you tell me so?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics from From Across the Room, Pt. 2 ([Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/track/4ZqwCkd2VP0PkMLwlN5iep?si=q0u99N3JS12KYKRSK-Gt8w)/[Bandcamp](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/from-across-the-room-part-2)). As far as I know, there isn't a part 1…?
> 
> Here it is! Bernadetta time! Finally, she's… wait, hold on, what happened to the year

**1180**

It was the last day of the Garland Moon, and it was also, once again, the last day of Bernadetta’s life.

_Once again_ , she tried to think to herself, to calm herself out of another one of these spirals of terror and deadly fatalism. But every other time she had thought she was going to die, she had not been sprinting across the campus grounds of Garreg Mach, fleeing from an assailant who had, for months, endured her messing up everything, until finally, finally snapping and coming to kill her out of vengeance.

Putting it all out into words like that made her fears seem silly sometimes. In fact, when she was in that small slice of heaven that was her dorm room and the rest of the world was locked outside, it was one of her strategies to take out a little journal and write down the things that scared her. Everything looked small and manageable once it was in the little page of her notebook, written in the third person, so that she could take a deep breath, close her eyes, and then reread it as if it were the pages of a novel, and decide that this was a totally unbelievable novel, so it was probably unbelievable in real life.

The thing was, when she was not in her room, she could not put anything into words. The enormous wall of her full vocabulary became obscured by the black ooze of fear as it flooded her mindspace, splashing up higher and higher and leaving inky splotches until the only words and phrases she could still see clearly were “no”, “please”, “I’m sorry”, “my room”, “stupid Bernie”.

This time, even “my room” was missing, because she could not go back to the place where he knew she would be. She had run all across the monastery in search of a safe space, but nothing was safe, nowhere was safe, she would have to leave the grounds altogether, flee to somewhere no one would find her, in the wilderness, even if she would starve to death out there and be flayed alive by bandits—

She slammed into something weird: pliant, warm, solid but soft. The force of the impact had her staggering backwards, and the dizziness of being breathless and exhausted turned that stagger into a fall. She hit the stone path hard enough to scrape on her hands, and definitely hard enough to bruise on her bottom. She pried one wincing eye open, then the other, into the looming shadow standing over her.

Oh, Goddess.

She was going to die _right this minute_.

“H—” She tried to say his name, but all the breath came rushing out of her in a pant instead. “Hube—” she tried again, but her tongue was twisted and did not know how to finish that terrible name.

“Bernadetta,” Hubert greeted when she could not, folding his arms and drawing another step nearer. From down on the ground, she could see underneath the thick mass of dark hair that usually covered his right eye. Being stared at by one of Hubert’s eyes was bad. Being stared at by _both_ of them? Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. She scrambled to her feet so that she didn’t have to see it any longer.

“I’m s—” she gasped, then tried again, just to _finish_ it, to complete one stinking word in front of him, at least get a proper _apology_ out before he could choke the life out of her with the hand he was stretching forward, so that even if she ended up dead, at least he would not curse her eternal soul for the rest of its tormented existence, or something. “I’m sor—I’m _sorry!_ ”

“I don’t believe I gave anyone else permission to torment you into a school-wide chase,” he said with that awful, slippery smile of his that sent chills into every single one of Bernadetta’s doomed little bones. “Who is responsible for this?”

“It’s my fault!” she blurted, and now the torrent of words started. She did not know what they would be any sooner than the poor victim who had to hear them. “It’s all my fault, please just—d-don’t make it painful, just kill me quickly! _Please!_ ”

She squeezed her eyes shut, awaiting judgment. Her ears just about shriveled into her skull when instead, she heard Hubert starting to chuckle.

Her chest seized. She grabbed at it, trying to gasp in air, but it was about as effective as trying to pick the air up with her bare hands. That weird wheezing sound that whistled on after Hubert’s cackling finally settled into silence was probably coming from her.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Bernadetta,” he taunted. “You will just have to go on living. Tell me, what horrid villain is out for your life that you would come to _me_ for mercy?”

There were a bunch of things she wanted to say all at once to that. He was no villain—the blame all lay with her, as she had said—and she certainly had _not_ meant to come to Hubert of all people—but best not to mention that part, or be careful with her words if she did. Hubert was probably the one person here she was more afraid of than—

His voice came echoing in from the adjacent hall: “ _Bernadetta!_ ”

Any half-sputtered words froze on her lips and tongue from her blood running cold. Something—some _one_ —touched her shoulder. With a yelp, she jumped away—but it was Hubert’s hand, pushing her through the doorway.

“Into the classroom. Hide,” he ordered in a low voice, his head turned away to watch the door. “I will keep him out.”

She did not need to be told twice. Hiding sounded great. She had a spot for it between the furnace jutting out of the wall and the bookshelf beside it, toasty from the fire in the early spring and now cool from the shaded stone wall in the summer. She may have, in a late-night walk around the grounds to familiarize herself with the area without people crowding it, snuck into the classroom to create it for herself. With a table inched just a _little_ closer to the edge of the classroom, and pushed back a little too, just enough that it was too hard to sit at the bench at the side of the table nearest her because of the furnace blocking it, the spot was a perfect, enclosed bubble. No one came near her. Some people probably never even saw her. She could come to class almost every day.

Until last week, when she _sprained Ferdinand’s wrist_.

She did not even remember how it happened. That was how it went most times she got into a panic. That whole event was packed up in a box labeled _You Sprained Ferdinand’s Wrist and He’s Going to Kill You Now_ , which was pretty hard to convince herself to open up. From experience, she knew that, even if she did manage to unpack that horrible box, it would just be a whole lot of fluff and padding. It was not a matter of repression, but of being so far inside or outside of her head at the time that she completely missed what was happening altogether. For instance, right now, Ferdinand was chasing her, but she did not remember why, or how it started, or how she had gotten here.

“Hubert,” he said, and oh, Goddess, his voice was really close now, and it was _really_ angry.

“Ferdinand,” Hubert replied. “To what do I owe the displeasure?”

“Do not worry, I will be quick with you. Have you seen Bernadetta?”

She was making Hubert _lie_ for her. Sure, Hubert probably lied all the time—he was all about tricks and cunning and underhanded ways—but she was _making_ him lie. For _her_.

“I could probably count the number of times I’ve _seen_ Bernadetta on my own two hands,” Hubert retorted. “Why in the world do you ask?”

So, technically, he had not lied. But he would. It was only a matter of time.

She felt a scream burning in her lungs, but her hands were too full of her hair to cover her gaping mouth. Her knees were tucked up close enough to her chest that she could bite down into one of them to relieve the pressure building inside her. Ferdinand’s and Hubert’s voices got louder and louder, and she bit down harder with each horrible line one slung at the other. She heard every word, she did not want to hear any words, that was eavesdropping, she was not supposed to be here, she did not _want_ to be here, she did not want to be anywhere, and they were _yelling_ , and she was going to die, and dying was honestly going to be great if it would just hurry up and happen already.

She did not remember when it ended. She did not even remember what was said; it truly went in one ear and out the other, even if she remembered comprehending every word in the moment. There were bite marks on her knees and her hands, and more than a day’s worth of stray hairs threaded around her fingers, and her name, someone grabbing her and saying her name, Bernadetta, stupid Bernadetta, to be unseen and unheard Bernadetta, tear yourself apart until you are small enough to fit between the cracks in the walls—

“Bernadetta, are you alright?”

She yelped at the sound of a voice she wholly did not recognize, clawing at whatever had a hold on her shoulder. The full might of her ugly, unmanicured nails dug through fabric and tore into skin. Her attacker released her with a growl of pain. That sound did not terrify her as much as the first, because this time, she recognized Hubert’s voice.

She sucked in a gasp, probably the last breath she would take for the next five minutes, or maybe the rest of her life, because as Hubert’s hand withdrew, she saw the split seam in his uniform sleeve, and the swelling pink lines along his white skin drawn by her fingernails, and the runs in the fabric besides, and he was holding his wrist the same way Ferdinand had when he—

“ _No!_ ” she shrieked, throwing herself back against the wall so hard that her head spun from the blow for a second. “No, no, no, oh, Bernie, _now_ you’ve done it…”

Hubert turned his attention from examining his wrist to looking down at Bernadetta, and oh Goddess that was both of his eyes again, this was the _worst_. “I see you’re back to your usual self, then,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry!” she squeaked, this time throwing herself to the floor in front of his feet. “I sprained your wrist, too, didn’t I?! I’m sorry, I’ll do anything, just please don’t kill me!”

She barely recognized Hubert’s voice when he spoke again. This time, it was too high instead of too soft. “Is… _that_ what happened to his wrist last week?”

“No!” she cried, knocking her forehead against the floor beneath her. “I-I mean, yes, but—I didn’t mean to!”

“Would you cover your ears a moment, Bernadetta?”

That… was a request. As part of his appeasement, maybe. She slapped her hands over her ears and squeezed without lifting her head from the floor. “Okay! Covering! They’re covered! I’m not listening or anything!”

When the last reverberation of her own voice left her skull, the sounds of the outside world began to seep in past her palms. She heard a cackle that she had heard only once or twice in real life, but countless times in her subsequent nightmares. She bit her tongue holding in a terrified whimper. She buried her head deeper into her curled position, shuffling her knees up until she could squeeze her ears between them so hard that everything just filled up with a ringing noise instead.

The nudge of a shoe against her arm startled her out of her tightly-curled ball. With a strangled screech, she flung her hands flat to the floor and put herself back into begging-for-mercy pose. “S-sorry! I’m sorry, I didn’t know how long I was supposed to—wait, no, you said a _moment_ , I was supposed to know that, wasn’t I?! Oh, you messed it up _again_ , Bernie—”

“Nonsense,” said Hubert. “I should be the one apologizing for my… lapse in composure.”

“No, _I’m_ the one who sprained your wrist!” She flattened herself further to the floor in prostration. “I’m really, really sorry, I swear! I’ll—grovel at your feet for eternity, or shine your shoes, or clean your room, or—”

“None of that will be necessary,” Hubert interrupted. “Allow me to make you finally aware of the fact that my wrist is _not_ sprained, though I thank you for your concern.”

Ironically, just as she received a smidgen of hope that her heart would be permitted to go on beating despite this altercation, it felt like it stopped in her chest. “It—it’s not?”

“I would never lie to you.” Hubert paused. “Are you going to st—”

“But!” Bernadetta sputtered, a whole train of words already barrelling out of her before she could pull the brakes. “But I still _ruined_ your sleeve, didn’t I? So you’re still going to plot your revenge against me, unless I—What do I have to do?! Do I have to kill someone for you? I’ll do it, _really_ , just don’t—”

“On your feet, Bernadetta.”

She leapt up so quickly it made her head spin with dizziness. When she blinked the spots from her eyes, she found Hubert standing a safe distance away from her, one thin eyebrow quirked slightly higher than the other.

“There are some wrongs,” he said, examining his torn sleeve, “that cannot be righted.”

A squeal slipped out from between her pursed lips. She bumped hard into the wall behind her despite not consciously trying to back away. The world was going blurry and dark at the edges, not in the bloodless way from standing up too quickly, but in the tunnel-vision way she got when she could feel her heart pounding in her chest and up through the veins in her neck and rushing past her eardrums.

“This is not one of them.” Slowly, Hubert extended his arm towards Bernadetta. “I happen to know you are handy with a needle and thread, whereas I have… little skill with such things. Would you be able to mend my uniform?”

Her pinpoint focus shifted to the tears in his sleeve, cataloguing all of the damage. The seam would be easy to mend, but the split threads in the weave of the fabric would require more creativity. Even though unsure of the solution, she bobbed her head up and down, saying, “I-I can do that! Yeah!”

“Excellent.” A smile started to slide onto Hubert’s lips, but his hand slipped over it before Bernadetta had to witness its full horror. “Then, once the damage is undone, I believe all debts shall be repaid, so you will not have to fear any plots of revenge.”

Bernadetta blinked. She could see the corner of Hubert’s smile peeking out from between his fingers, and the hint of it in his eyes. Even with her heart still thumping its way down from her adrenaline spike, none of it scared her now. She had always known that behind his nightmare of a presence and his terror of a voice, there was a person she just needed to get to know better. Now, with each blink, she sought but did not see that which had once frightened her in his features. His voice was gentle and soft; his smile was crooked, but kind.

“Is that agreeable to you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Um. Thanks, Hubert.”

His hand fell from his chin, and the smile had fallen away with it. “Not at all. I’ll leave the jacket outside your door sometime tonight.” With that, he turned away, walking around the table to make his slow exit from the classroom. “I should inform you that, after extensive interrogation, I have determined that Ferdinand bears you no ill will. In fact, I understand that he wishes to offer you… some kind of apology.” He stopped at the open doorway to give her one last pointed look. “I told him to check the stables for you, since you are scheduled for duty there today. If you would like to clear up any misunderstandings between the two of you, you will likely find him there.”

Bernadetta took a moment to respond. The glare of the sunlight behind him darkened his features, but there was something forlorn in his stare in the second before he stepped outside and out of sight.

“Right,” she said to nothing but an empty classroom.

Before she could do anything else, she sank slowly back to the floor and exhaled. Though her moment of alone time would not last long, she soaked up as much energy as she could, taking deep breaths, closing her eyes to the world around her, running her fingers along the cool stone walls. It grounded her in the present stillness, an alternative to mentally replaying each disaster in the string of mishaps she had just stumbled through. Soon she could no longer feel her heart thumping too hard inside her chest, and then her mind wandered away from her breathing. She traced shapes in her sleeve, envisioning darning stitches and embroidery that would complement the silk weave and gold trim.

At the number two in a silent countdown from ten, Bernadetta rose. She peeked around corners at every turn and doorway, because Ferdinand needed to be where she expected him and nowhere else, or it would throw her off and she would run all the way back to her room and lock herself in. The walk to the stables was its own sort of countdown, not numbered but still within her control. Everything felt just a little bit easier with the buffer of her own countdown before something hard.

The plume of his golden-red hair was all that crested the half-door of the stable he crouched in, cooing soft words to the pregnant mare lying on her side within. Ordinarily, his presence was so loud that it made Bernadetta physically recoil, and every time he made mention of proper behavior and nobility, he reminded her of some of the worst parts of her father. But here, he was gentle-voiced, his knees waded in hay and filth, and he seemed so kind that it set her heart aflutter.

He heard her tentative approach, saving her from having to pick out the first words of the conversation. His eyes went wide and bright when he saw her, then settled into something rueful to match his smile. “Bernadetta,” he said in that same gentle voice that he had used on the mare, “It is good to see you, but I am most sorry to have frightened you earlier. I thought I had something of importance to tell you, but I am afraid I was mistaken. Please, think nothing of it, and head home.”

She blinked in silence for a while, and Ferdinand gave her that sad smile for almost as long, before he turned his attention back down to the mare. His hair fell in his eyes in a soft shape that Bernadetta watched a while longer.

“B-but,” she finally stammered, “I’m… I’m on duty.”

“Then allow me to cover your shift, as a way of apology for troubling you today,” he replied, stroking the horse’s swollen belly with one hand. “If she is lying on her side, she may be foaling tonight. Please let me handle this for you, since I have experience with this.”

Bernadetta peered into the stable. The mare made eye contact with her for a moment, then dropped her head lower with an exhausted snort. Ferdinand started to reach out towards her tired face with a hand wrapped in bandages, then pulled it back as if thinking better of it.

“C—can I help?”

Ferdinand’s eyes went wide and bright again, and she decided that was what gave her those butterflies in her chest. It might have also had something to do with how he towered over her when he stood to open the door for her, or the way she heard his joy and excitement when he took his boisterous tone of voice again and suddenly it did not scare her anymore.

She had not seen it, but hung on a hitching post outside the stable was a garland of white roses.


	5. If I touched you, would you remember me? Through all these years, would you remember me?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's doing a promotion where they waive vendor fees so that all revenue goes directly to the artist? That's right, it's Bandcamp! From 12:00 AM PDT to 11:59 PM PDT on May 1 you can stan Lo-ghost (and other independent artists) by purchasing music off of their Bandcamp page. As a suggestion, today's chapter title comes from [Reverend](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/reverend).
> 
> CONTENT WARNINGS: Blood, needles, torture/abuse.

The first thing an ordinary, non-Hubert person’s eyes would gravitate to in Bernadetta’s room was the blood. Hubert glossed right over it, single-minded, as if he did not even see the glass tanks and bottles trickling with dark red liquid sitting on a small table in the dead center of the room.

The next thing one might notice—or, at least, it was what Ferdinand noticed—was the mess. Usually, a woman’s front chambers were for guests, a place to take tea or receive callers. Bernadetta, being herself, had instead pulled her tea table and all of her chairs towards the window and stacked them with a lively and terrifying assortment of plants. This not being her place of residence any longer, most of them hung absolutely flat and dead-brown over the edges of their pots, but some hardier breeds and succulents retained some of their green health. Aside from the spills of soil near the window, the floor was covered with reams of fabric, spools of thread, finished and unfinished projects, even plush things with terrifying numbers of limbs that looked like those cursed dolls he had heard about as a child, probably stray sewing needles—

And _then_ one would look up from the clutter and find Bernadetta in a far chair in front of the bookcase, pale as death, in a gown like she was dressed to be married, and shaking as violently as the bonds around her body would allow her to move.

The blow to his chest was twofold, first from the hammer of his heart against his ribs to see her in such a horrifying state, and then from the arm braced against him that he slammed into when he tried to dart forward. Hubert held him back, glowering at Bernadetta with unbridled rage. Before Ferdinand could speak a single word of indignation, Hubert had already fired off a question to the trembling woman: “What was the shape and color of the purse you carried when you attended Garreg Mach?”

Only with alternating tugs of her wrist that strangled her throat, and twists of her neck that squeezed her wrist bloodless, could she slowly, slowly turn her head enough to almost see the door out of the corners of her wide, terrified eyes. “H—” She choked on the rope trying to say his name, and it came out as a hoarse whisper when she tried it the second time. “Hubert?”

Pretenses gone, he pulled off his hood, but the face it revealed was venomous. “Answer the question,” he snarled.

“Hubert,” Ferdinand yelled, pushing against the arm still blocking his way to Bernadetta, “what is the meaning of this?!”

Bernadetta’s eyes widened even further at the sound of Ferdinand’s voice. She tried to turn to see him, and he tried to push into her field of vision. She gagged on the ropes again, and Hubert shoved him back against the door, wearing a glare more seething than any he had ever before worn. “Do you recall how we were deceived by Tomas and Monica?” Hubert spat.

Ferdinand could feel the blood running cold through his body, chilling his fingertips and weakening his knees. He looked at Bernadetta. He could not see into her eyes.

“W-wait!” she squealed. “You mean li—like _impostors_?”

Hubert’s glare tapered off into a puzzled frown. Still trying to wiggle her way into facing forward, Bernadetta gestured in their direction with the flailing, unrestrained elbow hanging above her head, even when it made her gag.

“Y—you two h—prove who _you_ are!” She gasped for breath when she finished. Ferdinand recognized the sound; he knew it was not just the rope that was choking her. “Why are y—working together?!”

Hubert gave a groaning sigh and a roll of his eyes. “I wish I knew the answer to that, myself,” he muttered. Ferdinand elbowed him in the side.

“Bernadetta, it is a very long story, but clearly it is us, really and truly,” he assured her, keeping his voice calm but bright with hope. “Hubert even asked you about your hedgehog purse, so—”

He cut off when Hubert elbowed him back with a much harder blow, and this one to the gut. “Well done in answering my question for _Bernadetta_ ,” he hissed, giving him a livid look.

“When I r—”

She cut off and then back in, with a pained whimper, from too violent a turn with no slack in the rope to support it. Both Ferdinand and Hubert flinched forward, and then Hubert threw his hand back across Ferdinand’s chest to stop him from taking another foolish step. Ferdinand did not roll his eyes. He looked at the ceiling, yes, but then guided his eyes respectfully straight down, so that clearly the gesture he had made was not one that could be called “rolling”.

Her voice was softer when she started again. “When I ran out—black thread, what color did—” She coughed once. “—you tell me to—use instead?”

The question made no sense to Ferdinand. He looked to Hubert, and the sight haunted him for… he did not know how long. Perhaps the rest of his life.

He had never seen Hubert smile like this before. His eyes relaxed, and his brow was smooth. The corners of his lips turned up at uneven rates as if he were trying to fight the expression from coming to his face. He had never looked at ease before, ever.

“As I recall it, you suggested gold to match the color of the uniform’s ornamentation.” Much like his expression, his voice had softened to something new and warm, too. “I insisted upon silver, instead—I never much cared for all the gold decorating a man of my low station. You stitched over the torn seam in the shape of a serpent.”

Bernadetta’s chest heaved in and out of the prison of her impossible corset as her breaths got faster and faster. Tension overtook Hubert’s posture again, emanating from him in waves as he waited for her to say something, do something, give some sort of signal to break the spell of silence in the room.

It came out all broken and weak and absolutely heartwrenching, hearing all her fear and her guarded relief in the way she said, “W-what’s going on?”

“Barricade the door,” Hubert muttered to Ferdinand, already leaning into the near-sprint he took to Bernadetta.

He had one hand behind his back, holding the same knife he had pulled on Ferdinand one very long day ago in Enbarr. He kept it out of Bernadetta’s sight for the equal and opposite reason he had drawn it in Ferdinand’s full view: to keep from frightening her when all he meant to do was loose her bonds. Ferdinand had to watch, to keep an eye on Hubert’s deft hand, even though he now knew, with every ounce of his being, that Hubert would never cause her harm.

“Hold still, Bernadetta,” Hubert said softly, taking her thin, raw wrist in his hand.

With delicate precision, he held her hand steady against his palm and slid a longer needle than Ferdinand had been expecting out from underneath the skin in the back of her hand. It dropped to the ground with a shallow ring while Hubert sliced through the twist in the rope connecting her throat and her wrist. As the rope came loose and unfurled, his hands supported her weary neck and aching shoulder. With her arm balanced atop his, he slowly, ever-so-slowly guided her hand down to rest in her lap, massaging her sore shoulder through the motion.

“Mark my words,” he said in a low voice as he pulled cord from her neck, cradling her heavy head with reverent touch, “when we have escaped from here, you will tell me everything these monsters have done to you, and I will make them pay tenfold.”

When she blinked up at him, two parallel tears dropped into the dark, heavy bags under her eyes. She nodded, then gasped and swallowed around a sob.

He pulled yet another sickeningly long needle from the arm Bernadetta had tied to the chair leg behind her, this one lodged in her bruised inner elbow. Ferdinand had to look away to keep from becoming nauseated. It was the first time he had torn his eyes from her, even while crossing the room for furniture suitable for a barricade. Hubert, too, did not break eye contact with her for more than a second at a time. Her heavy breaths had turned to shuddering ones, their sound haunting all corners of the room.

By the time Ferdinand had cleared the tea table and a chair of their plants and begun dragging them to the door, Hubert had freed Bernadetta’s other arm. She gripped the edges of her seat next to her thighs, breaths whistling in and out of her tight corset as Hubert leaned over her, tipped her head forward into the crook between his neck and his shoulder, and carefully slid the blade of the knife down her spine, snapping through the corset laces. Her breathing got deeper and slower with every cut, every extra inch of space for her lungs to take up, until the last string popped loose and she took in a sharp gasp. The chair wobbled almost to tipping as she lunged forward, ducking under Hubert’s arm and shoving against the corset as she tried to stand with her ankles still bound to the chair legs.

With a soft hushing sound, Hubert held her chair steady and firm through her frantic thrashing. “Gentle, love,” he murmured, running his fingertips gingerly through her hair while he pulled the corset away from her chest. “Just a moment longer.”

Ferdinand felt as though he were seeing something he ought not to be. He jammed the back of a chair under the doorknob and anchored it in place with the weight of the table, only looking up at the sound of Bernadetta’s chair legs rattling again. This time, it was to yank her foot away from Hubert’s hand as soon as the last rope was severed. She launched herself upright, immediately started to sag and sway, and yet still tried to run in the unsteady heels she was wearing. Within a few steps, she tripped over the voluminous tulle of her skirts and fell to her hands and knees. Even then, she crawled, her dress falling open at the back to expose her white back lined with red from the back of the chair and the slashes from the laces between her vertebrae. She scrambled and dragged herself along the floor until she had made it to the space in the far corner of the room between the bookshelf and a sewing table, under which she curled into a trembling ball.

“Bernadetta,” Ferdinand cried, dodging tables, chairs, and strange tanks of blood to make his way towards her.

“ _No!_ ” She stopped him with an arm snapped out to point his way, quivering despite her resolve, and a terrified stare that made the pieces of his broken heart sink in his chest, slicing into his insides like shards of glass. “No, no, I don’t—I don’t know—I don’t know if—”

She gasped between each attempt to speak. Hubert’s voice cut in from behind Ferdinand, low and measured, to finish for her. “You haven’t proven your identity to her,” he explained.

“Hubert can vouch for me,” Ferdinand said calmly, keeping his hands raised in innocence. “If you trust him, then you can trust me.”

“Hmm. I don’t know.” Hubert, veritable monster, sauntered up beside Ferdinand and made a show of examining him from head to toe, a hand stroking his chin and concealing his smile. “I did leave him out of my sight for a number of hours last night. That would have been enough time for a fool such as him to have been replaced by a doppelgänger.”

Ferdinand’s jaw fell so far open that he could not hold back the indignant scoff that tumbled out of his throat. “How could you jest at a time like this?!” he shouted, throwing another elbow into Hubert’s side. “Bernadetta, he is lying. I swear to you, I am Ferdinand von Aegir, son of Lu—”

He cut off when Hubert’s hand swept under his chin palm up, displaying his face to Bernadetta. Hubert had an eyebrow raised and a smile quirked. “My doubts are assuaged,” he said sarcastically. “No one says ‘I am Ferdinand von Aegir’ like the real Ferdinand von Aegir.”

Ferdinand swatted Hubert’s hand out of his face, sputtering over what affronted remark to make. “What is that supposed to mean?” he eventually settled on, but Hubert just turned away and chuckled.

“What…”

They both fell silent when Bernadetta spoke up, her voice hoarse. She shriveled further into her huddle at the sudden attention. Her eyes were still wide with fear, red-rimmed and wet, but something brightened in them. In the silence the two men left her, she found her courage and her words.

“What’s, um, my horse’s name?” she asked. “Her _secret_ name.”

She had to clarify, because “Buttercup” had almost burst from Ferdinand’s lips before she finished the question. Hers was not a horse he could forget. Her secret name was one that had been spoken only in whispers, nearly six years ago on the dusty floor of the monastery stables, as the Garland Moon set and the Blue Sea Star rose. Their fingers were yellowed with pollen and pigment from the eponymous flowers they wove into the young filly’s wet mane, when he saw Bernadetta smile at him for the first time and fell even deeper and more hopelessly in love than a crown of white roses could ever express.

“By day, she is known to the common-folk as Buttercup,” he said as he knelt to Bernadetta’s level. “But only we witnessed her birth and coronation, on the thirtieth eve of the Garland Moon in the year 1180, as Princess of the Night. When her mother let us near in the dark hours of the morning, we crowned the newborn princess with the wild buttercups we had picked while we waited through the night, so that she would not be a less decorated lady than yourself. You, of course, were wearing the rose garland I had given you as a token of my… of many things.” He shook his head ruefully. “It was meant to be a peace offering, and an apology, but most importantly, it was a symbol of our friendship for the years to come.”

Despite trembling from head to toe, despite seeping blood from her hand and her elbow, despite all of the fear that had plagued her throughout her young life, Bernadetta crawled out from under the sewing table. Even when she staggered to her feet, Ferdinand stayed kneeling. It was picturesque of an oath of fealty, yet he would swear much deeper to her.

“Y-you,” she all but whispered, “you really… came here to save me?”

Ferdinand smiled up at her with all of the warmth he felt in his chest. “I will always come to your rescue, should you need me,” he promised.

“And I suppose I will come to point him in the right direction when he goes running off blind into the night,” Hubert muttered wryly. When Ferdinand looked his way, he was in the process of discarding a teasing smile for Ferdinand, trading it for a more solemn look as he cast his eyes down to Bernadetta.

Her eyes flicked between the two for a silent moment. As soon as her lip started to quiver and the thin line of tears began to bead on her squinting lashes, Ferdinand rose, ready to come to her side in comfort, only for her to stumble forward to him first, throwing her arms around him. She was too cold, a cool spot against his chest instead of a warm one; she was too wet, the tears on her cheeks bleeding into the fabric of his shirt; she was too small, too soft, too precious. He turned all of himself inward to encompass her, wrapping his arms across her bare back, ducking his head low to touch hers.

“I am so sorry, Bernadetta,” he murmured into her hair, smelling of lavender. “Are you alright?”

“I-I’m okay, I think.” Her fingers dug into the back of his coat. “I’ll be okay.”

“As much as it pains me to interrupt this touching reunion,” Hubert said through his clenched teeth, “we have less than thirty minutes remaining to secure your escape.”

Bernadetta hopped back from of the embrace as soon as he spoke. Her arms flailed out to her sides as she listed backwards, a daze in her eyes. She had just about stumbled herself right again before Ferdinand and Hubert both reached to steady her, Ferdinand by one hand and the waist, Hubert by the other and a shoulder. “Sorry! Sorry,” she yelped, snapping her hands back to cover her pink face. “I’m okay. Really.”

It was not terribly convincing. Ferdinand’s hand stayed near her waist in anticipation. “What have they done to you?” he said, voice breathy with horror.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what they wanted, except…” She peered up at him between her fingertips with wide eyes, with a quick glance at Hubert. “It was my—my dad,” she said in a small voice. “I mean, sort of. So, um, you know how I always go outside at night because there aren’t any people around, so when they—”

“Bernadetta,” Hubert interrupted, “I believe I specifically requested this report to be given to me _after_ we have escaped.”

“W-wait! Wait,” Bernadetta pleaded, rubbing at the lingering wetness under her eyes with clenched fists. “Hubert, there’s somebody my dad’s working with—they’re manipulating him, really, it’s not even like he’s _working_ with them, it’s—they’re _really_ powerful, and if they’re cooperating with—with _him_ , then they’re even going against the Empire, so—”

“I am aware, Bernadetta.” He did not so much as lighten his expression with a hint of a smile as he said, “I thank you for your concern. You may tell me more when we are at least ten miles away from here.”

She froze with her mouth half-open and took several seconds to shut it. With a nod and a soft, “Okay,” she took one wobbly step forward. She gathered her long, voluminous skirt in fistfuls and looked down at her pale ankles, as rope-burned as her wrists, stuffed into teetering dress shoes composed more of laces and straps than fabric or leather. “Actually, can I have, um. Five minutes. Please?”

Sighing, Hubert threaded a finger through the ties on his cloak to loosen it from his neck. “Very well,” he said with affected reluctance, shrugging off the cloak as he stepped toward Bernadetta. “I believe it will be your turn to wear this, unless you have another hooded garment to change into.”

He draped the cloak over her shoulders, its many extra inches pooling on the floor at her feet despite her heels. Though he did not meet her gaze, her eyes were wide and shining as she looked up at his face, taking in all of the soft notes of his severe features that told of his kindness. The little squeak she let out as she bumped into his chest and squeezed him in her arms was undercut by the surprised noise that tumbled from his unexpecting lips at the impact. He raised his arms well out to his sides to minimize contact with her, as if he had not held her so tenderly when she needed his help. His face had a subtle flush of pink to it. Just as he was beginning to let his uncertain arms settle down towards her, she jumped back with a little gasp and an apologetic, “Okay! Okay, I’m done! Promise! Sorry.”

Ferdinand would have found the whole thing cute, if it did not break his heart a little to see how much better suited the two were for each other than for him.

On the first step away from Hubert, Bernadetta started to trip, but instead kicked hard enough to fling off one of the deadly shoes cramping her feet. She kicked off the second with the second step, this one sailing across the room and leaving a mark on the floral wallpaper where it struck heel-first. Then she scurried into an adjoining room, slammed the door shut behind her, and called out a tremulous, “Don’t come in here!” from beyond the door.

Silence fell between the two men left behind, though Hubert barely hesitated in coming to examine the blood-laden glassware standing in the center of the room. He twisted the tanks and bottles on their pedestal, peering inside to scrutinize the bizarre mechanism of tubes and tilts, and the strange ornaments and instruments embedded within.

“What _is_ the plan?” Ferdinand asked in a low voice. “Once Bernadetta is ready.”

“Likely, you’ll exit the way that you came,” he said with some distance to his voice. “Through the servants’ passages would be best, since we’ve gone through the trouble of disbarring it from the opposite side.” After a beat, he looked up, and within a second pointed to a tall bookshelf leaning against the wall. “Behind that shelf, I believe. You may confirm with Bernadetta before moving it.”

“Am _I_ to move it? With no help from you?” Ferdinand sniffed, though he walked towards the shelf in question to appraise its weight and mobility.

“I’m occupied presently.” But he looked up again from his investigation, at least halfway, for another glance. “Now would be an appropriate time to put your shoes back on. You look like a ragamuffin.”

Ferdinand scrunched his nose in even greater petulance. Nevertheless, it was the ideal opportunity, so he fished out the boots he had stuffed into his rucksack and crouched to replace them, first brushing dirt and debris from his socks.

He felt a small shift against his scalp, the brush of his hair gently caught in something forgiving. When he looked up, a long lock of his hair hung tangled in Hubert’s gloved fingers. Hubert pulled his hand slowly back, combing through his hair from middle to the very ends, before brushing his fingertips against his thumb. As Ferdinand’s hair fell strand by strand back to his side, two small leaves fluttered to the ground from Hubert’s palm as he turned it over.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for the past hour,” was all that Hubert muttered before turning back to the blood tank.

Ferdinand tied his boot too tight. He struggled to undo the knot and loosen the laces to something breathable, despite having worn and marched and fought in these same boots for years now.

As he redid the tie, he spared glances up at Hubert, his contemplative silence, and the horror between his hands. From one of the hollow needles that had been plunged into Bernadetta’s veins, blood streamed into the first glass bubble, where it trickled through filters and smoky spells into a number of inner chambers, and eventually out to the other needle. The outgoing tube was near the top of its spherical compartment, ensuring that what little blood that made it to that final section instead of into one of the collecting vials sitting beneath the contraption would only flow back into Bernadetta’s veins when the tank was too full to hoard more.

“What is that vile thing?” he ventured to ask at last.

“An experiment.” With a twist and a pull from one of the late-stage compartments of the glass monstrosity, Hubert removed a round beaker comparatively scarce of a liquid looking blacker than blood from its tints of green. “I was hoping there might be some way to restore Bernadetta’s blood to her body. She is a bit unsteady for lack of it.”

Understandably so. The main tank compartments were all near to full. Though the curves in the glass magnified their contents, it looked like more than an entire human’s complete supply of blood.

“However, the dark magic embedded in the glass complicates matters, feasibility of the task notwithstanding.” As Hubert tilted and turned the bottle in front of his eyes, engravings reminiscent of Crest sigils caught the daylight and stood out against the thick substance within. “I wouldn’t want to introduce tampered blood to her body in its delicate state.”

“Is that what that… _thing_ is, that you are holding now?” Ferdinand asked. “It is dark magic?”

Hubert slid his eyes down to Ferdinand. His lip twitched. “No,” he said. “Far from it. More likely, this is a concentrated solution of dragon’s blood.”

Ferdinand rose cautiously to his feet. “Dragon’s blood,” he repeated, only believing such a fantastical phrase because it came from Hubert’s mouth. “So then, Those Who Slither in the Dark were putting dragon’s blood inside of her?”

“No,” said Hubert again. “They were attempting to take it _from_ her.”

As Ferdinand got closer, he began to see the details behind Hubert’s clipped sentences and flat tone. Past the hair that covered his features, his eyes were dark in a way that had nothing to do with shadow. A deep crease had formed in his brow. His fingertips had a slight backward bend against everything that he gripped with too much force.

With no warning except an angry twitch crossing his face like a wave, he took hold of the front two legs of the table holding all of the blood-laden glassware and yanked them forward, upending the dark experiment into freefall. When all of those glass pieces were inches away from the hardwood floor, Ferdinand blinked in an involuntary cringe. The sound of shattering was not as bad—despite the cascade of it, one portion breaking followed by another, in an endless ring of broken glass hitting the floor—as the slick slaps of the blood hitting the floor, leaving splotches in the shape of Bernadetta amidst the shards and dust. In the middle of it, letting out an animalistic snarl, stood a Hubert that Ferdinand was not sure he recognized.


	6. I think I need you now, I’m bloodloss dizzy and I hope you’re coming around

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's Lo-ghost song is depressed, depraved "I know what's bad for me" simp anthem is [I Break My Own Heart](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/i-break-my-own-heart).
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNINGS - THIS CHAPTER SUCKS** (and is so homoerotic that people told me to upgrade the rating from T to M!)
> 
>   * Bugs. Bugs is the big one. Every bug. Spiders, centipedes, wasps, cockroaches, you name it, so did I, and it's not pleasant. If you want to read the version without bugs, go here: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eV-JqUc8WyWuk2v3L5JVrE4EOegWosZ6v-f6adqCqcw/edit?usp=sharing>
>   * Blood & gore that's slightly worse than usual
>   * Light emeto content
>   * Torture (specifically hand mutilation)
>   * Is Hubert your comfort character? Look Away Now
> 


As the pool of Bernadetta’s defiled blood spread across the floorboards and encircled his shoes, Hubert began to consider that, in retrospect, that was rather over the top of him.

After he scrubbed shards of glass away from his pant legs, only to have his white gloves come back smeared with fresh blood from the backsplash, he glanced at Ferdinand as he rose for an indication of how far over the top he had gone. Ferdinand’s wide eyes and pale complexion told him, yes, it had been _rather_.

If that were not indication enough, next the door to Bernadetta’s bedroom creaked a cautious two inches open. Once she had halfway appraised the situation with one terrified eye peeking through the crack, she let the door fall all the way open, only to flinch when the blood and glass came into her line of sight.

Though she had not changed out of her white dress, Hubert’s cloak now covered her open back. She had traded her formal heels for an only-slightly-more-comfortable pair of women’s dress riding boots, meant to allow a skirt to rise to a scandalous mid-shin height without exposing a woman’s tantalizing ankles. Most likely, she had not had any practical options among the clothes stored in her abandoned home wardrobe, because the Count had kept her closet full of only the noblest and most disabling of women’s attire.

The painted florals on the leather ran up the sides of her calves past her knee, and there were a handful of inches of bare thigh before her hiked-up, girded tie of the dress’s skirts and the cloak’s tails, and oh, Count Varley could never have guessed the radiant warrior his daughter would become in spite of him, and in spite of her own fears.

“W-what’s going on?” she asked.

Ferdinand might have seen him uncomposed, but Hubert would not have Bernadetta witness the same. Before he spoke, he straightened his posture and folded his arms to hide his stained hands. “I take it you are ready to depart?” he said with as much amicability as his voice had the capacity for. “Apologies for wasting this blood of yours by spilling it all over the floor, but unfortunately, I’m going to need it.”

He stepped deeper into the center of the spreading pool as Bernadetta watched with horror. “I… didn’t really want it anymore, I think? So that’s okay,” she offered in a higher voice than her usual. “Um, but. What are you using it for?”

“We’re parting ways,” he announced. “In the interest of time and safety, you and Ferdinand will make your escape without me. I’m going to use your blood and the dark magic imbued in it to mask my signature and warp out.”

Ferdinand looked at him like a kicked mutt. “Hubert, you are not coming with us?”

Hubert folded his arms tighter, only to feel a pair of sharp pricks against his palm. He checked his glove and found miniscule bits of glass bothering him through the fabric. When he gave his hand a shake to lose them, drips of blood flecked off of his wet fingertips along with the shards. Bernadetta watched her own blood soar through the air with a tiny yelp.

After a glance in her direction, Hubert muttered to Ferdinand, “It’s not as though I am horribly pleasant company.”

“N-no, no, no, it’s okay! I don’t have a thing about blood like Lin, it’s just—I mean, you just said it, and now it’s _weird_ , that it’s _my_ blood, and. Um. Okay. Before now, I totally thought you were, um… r-responsible for this? I mean! Because you’re in the—you’re with Edelgard, and the Empire, and you’re against us, and I really thought maybe someday you were gonna kill me? It’s not that I—I don’t trust—I mean, it’s not— _oh_ , Bernie, you’ve _really_ put your foot in it now—”

“Bernadetta,” Hubert and Ferdinand said at the same time, the latter calm, the former reproachful.

It was clear which of the two of them she should follow out of this manor.

“Ferdinand. My lance,” Hubert requested, pointing at where he had left it by the door. “Unfortunately, I’m mired to the spot unless I wish to leave something as damning as my own _footprints_ in this room.”

He scarcely had time to finish his justification for issuing demands to Ferdinand as if he were a subordinate before Ferdinand had already brought him the weapon. “Pleasant or not,” Ferdinand said, his voice quiet yet intense, “I will not leave without you.”

“Yeah,” Bernadetta chimed in.

Hubert almost choked over the next words he already had lined up in his throat, and thank the Goddess that he had them at all, or he would have been struck dumb.

“If we separate, you will be free to incapacitate any enemies by whatever drawn-out, non-lethal means you prefer,” he said. “There’s no harm in survivors witnessing you and Bernadetta fleeing together without me, and my time limit wouldn’t apply to you. I thought you would appreciate my giving you the pacifist option, Ferdinand.”

Ferdinand still had that near-pout in his eyes, the troubled look of knowing that what he wanted differed from what was right. “Promise me that this will not be the last we see of each other,” he conceded.

“An easy promise,” Hubert assented with a duplicitous sneer. War would bring them together, albeit on opposite sides of a battlefield, if happenstance did not.

“Then I shall wait until then to give you my thanks,” Ferdinand said, pressing the lance into Hubert’s hands.

Hubert pushed the lance back, closing Ferdinand’s fingers around the haft with a squeeze that lingered long enough to tip off a more cunning man as to what he was planning next.

“A moment. You aren’t rid of me yet,” he said. “I confess I didn’t retain most of what you told me about the grip you were demonstrating earlier, considering I was recovering from the shock of having a hole torn into my side. Show me again.”

Ferdinand was not cunning, perhaps not even clever, but he was compassionate and empathetic. Although he did not know what, he knew something was amiss. Trouble creased his brow as he stared unblinking into Hubert’s eyes even while shifting the position of his hands.

“The trick is simply to hold the juncture of your thumbs and fingers at perpendicular positions, rather than exact opposites,” he said, but Hubert was not listening again.

Though he could chain them in quick succession once he began, a warp spell was one of the most difficult in Hubert’s arsenal. He made a rule never to use it on a battlefield for the sheer concentration it took, and the too-high possibility of not ending up quite where he planned amidst a sea of flashing metal and deadly spells. The magic mounted in his chest unlike any other, as if dismantling him from the inside out for reassembly on the other side of the stream of darkness that would billow out from where his body had been once the spell triggered.

That trigger moment, when the magic flooding his body ignited and ripped him through the ether to his destination, was what Hubert was trying to suppress. He needed to prepare the spell while he still had time and clarity of mind, two things he was shortly planning to lose.

He built it quietly inside of him, a swirling miasma eager to leap that he forced to stay put, all while Ferdinand’s voice drifted in one of his ears and out the other, serving no purpose but to warm his brain with the vibrations as they passed through, for as long as he still had a brain inside his head at all. The magic was swallowing him as it grew. The numbness in his limbs was less jarring than the loss of proprioception. He guided his hands more with his eyes than his senses to squeeze the haft of the lance.

It really was a sturdy grip, he barely thought as he struggled to move the spear with his tingling arms. Then Ferdinand let go, the furrow in his brow deepening. Hubert shook his head, not trusting that he still had a tongue to speak, as he pointed the tip towards himself to simulate combat. “Keep holding it,” he hoped he said through the black fog flooding up through his head. “I need to see something.”

He was not a drinking man, but as the edges of his vision went fuzzy and faded from his awareness, the only word he could liken it to was _drunken_ , with the hint of pleasure that accompanied such insobriety. He teetered on the precipice of teleportation with such insecurity he almost felt half-existant, fading in and out of the world, and most certainly hollowed out, carved out in excruciating yet cathartic scrapes, little by little, more and more. Every aching bone, every war-torn muscle, every threadbare ligament and tendon was gone, neither here nor there. So too did his thick skin dissolve into something so papery-thin it was translucent, so light and pliable that he lost his shape, or perhaps his vision was starting to distort.

His hands only slid along the shaft on his first attempt to pull it; his weakened fists all but slapped into Ferdinand’s perfect grip. It was a grounding thing, that warmth seeping through his gloves from his palms into Hubert’s skin. He mimicked the shape and position of Ferdinand’s hands with his own, emulating his strength, his confidence, his swagger. The touch they shared anchored the last vestiges of Hubert’s mind in this moment, for one last calculated action before hell broke loose.

And here, he paused in the sensation of it all, the lack thereof, the in-between, the erotic high climbing higher, too high, too impossibly close to the sun, yet too glorious to resist. He edged closer, closer, closer to the point of no return, to the blissful and terrible end of his last moment in this fantasy. He met Ferdinand’s eyes—he tried to—and swam in the sickening pleasure of that warmth as long as he could.

With one swift jerk, he plunged the lance held by their four firm hands inside of him, all messy thrust and no finesse and hot liquid, searing, searing pain penetrating beneath his ribs, and a thrill of rising voices as he finally fell off of the edge of the cliff, splashed into blood, his or Bernadetta’s or both in hideous mélange, and with a thick, wet scream tearing out of his throat—

—silence, darkness.

Hubert’s senses returned to him one at a time. Pain was first, in a way, if one considered that it left at all. This pain was too strong to be felled for even a moment by something as trivial as the complete obliteration and rematerialization of a human body. For a brief flash, it faded from his awareness, until agony again burned brighter than everything else.

Taste was next, and smell with it, bile and blood in the back of his throat. He thought his sight had not come to him at all until he realized there was just no light here for him to see, something he should have expected. Underneath his tangled mass of flesh, he wriggled to feel the softness, now going stiff with rigor mortis, of a corpse, and the scent of his own dark magic in a spell he had cast well ahead of time in preparation for this moment. Any spells cast on top of it would fade together into a single muddy signature and could be explained away by the first, for which he had an alibi and a lawful motive.

Last and slowest to recover was sound. The foreign noise faded slowly into his awareness, a slow, rhythmic, but rough rasp that he eventually realized was the ragged wheeze of his own breaths, drenched with the blood seeping into his near-punctured lung.

Fifteen minutes until rescue. He would not last that long without medical intervention.

Though the stab wound was an essential part of the scheme, any reasonable person, Hubert reasoned, would immediately swallow down a concoction kept in their pocket upon being stabbed. With each movement, his skin pricked with the phantom splinters of lingering glass. He flexed his hand, blinking bleariness from his eyes to confirm that its bloodstained white shape against the darkness still obeyed his commands. The pinpricks bit at his hand from too many places as his fingers extended. He scrabbled for the cuff of his glove, to get it off, the blood, the glass, the sins. Each press of his wet-gloved fingers against his bare wrist as he tried to scrape away the soiled fabric pressed blood and pricks of glass into his skin, where every awful sensation touched him tenfold. The glass was everywhere, along his arms, inside his throat, or perhaps it was just a spreading icy chill of the blood sapping out of his veins and leaking from the pulsing, gushing hole in his stomach.

Right. The concoction.

After the eternity it took to dig the thing out of his pocket, he sucked at it with the thirst of a beggar trapped in Enbarr’s summer heat. He almost could not pry it from his lips. They gave up with a desperate, clinging pop that sloshed half a dose’s worth down his chin and neck that he could not help but lick at, stretching his tongue as far as he could to lap up meager drops, even when the emptiness of the bottle told him he had already swallowed much more than a single dose.

It buzzed pleasant warmth and gentle coolness through his veins all at once that he could not get enough of, until the full power of the concoction hit his stomach with a sick roil and he just about buzzed out of his skin. He fell into feverish shakes and disgusting heat that gave way to clammy cold, sweat beading across every inch of his skin. The air he coughed out of his lungs was as hot as steam. He gasped in the cold, dank air as if it tasted as fresh as a garden breeze, just to cool his boiling chest.

If these side effects were the only reason doctors forbade larger doses of healing potions, Hubert should have been downing them in one gulp all along.

He clamped a hand over the pulsing epicenter of pain in his chest and felt fresh, thick wet against his hand, then stinging salt in his blood. Though no longer so deep, the wound was still open and oozing. That was ideal. As long as the rest of the bottle stayed concealed—he felt about for his pocket with only a little less numbness than when he had first pulled out the concoction—the lingering injury still worked in his favor. According to his alibi, he had been completely inactive here for nearly two hours.

He shoved himself into rolling away from the body to which he had teleported. The rough, cold stone and all its filth raked against his body as he fought his way through a crawl towards where he hoped he had left the stairs. His knees hated every second of it. They would neither bear his weight against the floor, nor bend at his impulse. His legs alternated between locking rigid and going limp.

The stairs, when he finally dragged himself to them, were impossible. He knocked and scraped his chin against their edges trying to shove himself up just one more step. His fingertips lacked the strength to grasp a flat surface to any degree of utility. Each inch upwards had to be won by struggling elbows and flailing legs, all losing their feeling again with each drop of blood that Hubert trailed behind him.

Ten minutes to make it to the top of the stairs and assume the position of a man lying in helpless wait. The sooner he made it, the more minutes’ rest he would win.

As soon as he thought it, light spilled into the stairwell. It was too early. His men were ten minutes early. He would have their heads for that. He told them _exactly_ four o’clock.

He could not hear footsteps, but he had not heard the grinding of the opening door, either. “There was a traitor,” he rasped, reaching for the next step with a blind, shaking hand.

“I am aware.”

He did not recognize the voice, yet he knew it, the way he knew their empty eyes, their necrotic skin, their sickly auras.

The light hit his squinting eyes too hard in a dim so mild. The figure blotting it out in the doorway was blurring and shifting. “The prisoner escaped,” Hubert mumbled towards it, scraping his fingers along the stair for a grip.

“Not yet, he hasn’t.”

Periander’s voice. It had to be. Every move, every word mattered under a mind as keen as theirs.

“He’s after the girl. The Varley heir,” Hubert sputtered. He felt his mouth flooding with blood again as he gasped.

Thus barely a sound came out of him when Periander’s boot slammed through his knuckles.

_Oh._

Shattered. _Shattered._ The word rattled in Hubert’s head as something, _anything_ to think over the sound of neurons screaming, the incoherent, helpless pleas to powers that did not exist. He was all alone in this predicament, alone and unarmed. After exhausting and estranging all other potential resources, he now had nothing left in his hand but a miserable mess of _shattered_ metatarsals and phalanges.

“Reverse psychology?” Periander sneered, grinding their heel through his bones, as Hubert coughed and retched through the blood and the subsequent acid just to free up his mouth enough to gasp and scream. “I had hoped for better from the Emperor’s top advisor. You really are nothing but a child.”

They enunciated the final word with a kick to Hubert’s jaw that his teeth were lucky to survive. His head knocked into the wall beside the stairs with force enough to expel the last flecks of bloody sputum from his mouth. The force of separation between his ragdoll-flung body and his broken hand still pinned under Periander’s other foot nearly wrenched his arm out of his socket.

“To think that you would commit treason, though,” they said with a low cackle. “I wonder what the Emperor has to say about such actions. Perhaps our soldiers had better pay her a visit.”

Hubert could not control his writhing, swelling jaw enough even just to say a deadly, “ _No._ ” There was a certain horrible _peeling_ sensation when Periander lifted their foot from the sad remnants of his hand and his skin halfway lifted with the sole of their boot. A meek, squealing groan leaked from his mouth, but that was not nearly as humiliating as what leaked out of the hot corners of his eyes.

“May you rot quickly,” said Periander, and after the thrum of dark magic, there came the buzz of a swarm.

The thing about dark magic, what made it so horribly effective against most, yet resisted so strongly by a select few, was that it was primarily illusory. By knowing the tricks behind every dark spell, Hubert could ordinarily withstand even the deadliest magic cast.

Ordinarily.

He could not shut his gasping, heaving mouth, even as the bugs creeped over his skin and between his lips, slithered along his tongue and down his throat. The centipedes and spiders came straight for the half-hole exposed in his chest, while the roaches clamored for the tenderized meat of his hand. The crawling was not as bad—nor as downright lethal—as the consumption, the gnawing of his flesh bit by miniscule bit, now from within just as much as from the outside. His lungs filled with wasps, his stomach with beetles, flying in thick masses that threatened to burst his tissues open with each sting and bite weakening them further. It was not real, but that did not matter once it started to _feel_ real.

The spell faded eventually, but not before maggots had crawled into his ears and out of his nostrils, moths had eaten his eyelids, and his skin was covered in sores—that last part, unfortunately, _was_ real; the physical spell behind the insectoid illusion was a blistering gas that ravaged any exposed skin and internal tissues, if you were stupid enough to breathe it in. The light in the stairwell was gone, and Periander with it. No doubt the exit was now barred and guarded. Hubert’s soldiers would arrive in five minutes, as directed, and they would be slaughtered by a waiting ambush.

All his strategies of subterfuge were out the window. The only goal now was survival, not for himself, but for Her Majesty. He, and his foolish, naïve heart, had compromised everything that she had worked so hard and struggled so long to achieve. There would never be forgiveness for him. He could only strive towards repentance, as he had striven since failing to protect Lady Edelgard the first time, all those years ago. If nothing else, he _had_ to protect her now. Though his blood was running thin, he still had magic enough in his veins for another warp. He just needed to gather his strength to summon it.

He took in a shuddering breath against the burning in his lungs, the protest of his ribs, and the infected wound festering therein. His throat felt both stinging and sickly wet, and his entire body roiled with dizzy nausea.

All he needed was just another moment to collect himself. Just a few seconds’ rest against these stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure he's fine.


	7. I will make and burn an effigy of everything I loved and used to be, I will burn it to the ground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IIIIIT'S BANDCAMP DAY AGAIN KIDS!!! Friday June 5th from midnight to midnight Pacific time, full profit goes to the artists, you know the drill by now. Heads up that Bandcamp will also be doing a similar promotion on 6/19 where any proceeds will be donated to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, so if you're coming to this chapter late, you'll get a second chance soon.
> 
> Today's lyric title comes from [Lay Your Hands](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/lay-your-hands). I will forgive you for not buying Lo-ghost songs during the Bandcamp promo if you support black artists instead. Stay safe, fuck cops, keep fighting in whatever way you can.
> 
> No new horrible warnings today, but we do get into some of Bernie's child abuse shit so heads up.

Bernadetta had an instinct for danger. Or, it was possible, admittedly _likely_ , that she just thought everything was potentially dangerous and avoided all of it, and was sometimes validated by being right, but that was not the heart of the current matter. Hubert had been oozing more than his typical excess of that particular blend of whatever made Bernadetta seize up in trepidation. While Ferdinand drew closer to him, straining to hear his low murmurs, she backed away.

Lately, mostly as of a few minutes ago, things had been happening very, very fast for Bernadetta, especially when compared to the monotonous torture (literal torture!) of the past few days. Nothing had happened as fast as whatever happened between Ferdinand and Hubert right then. At the too-sudden twitch of the spear between their hands, she blinked. By the time her eyes opened again, Hubert had taken the spear down with him to writhe in the pool of her blood. She let loose a shriek, maybe because Ferdinand had given a shout first, maybe because she was prone to screaming at sudden movements and splashes of blood, maybe because of the sheer terror inherent in someone like Hubert falling to the floor.

She had never seen Hubert fall before. He was too clever, always one step ahead of his enemy, always in eerie command of the situation, no matter how dire. In their first raid against the Death Knight, with Edelgard gone, he had assumed the position of second in command to the professor with understated confidence that reminded her of the time a month prior when she had woken up in her dorm room, head on her pillow, shoes removed and tucked neatly under the lip at the foot of her bed, and her hedgehog purse just beside it. That was the kind of person Hubert was—one who thought of everything. No one and nothing outsmarted him.

And just like that, a beacon of darkness swallowed him, the quick burst of a warp. Ferdinand crashed to his knees beside the spot where Hubert had once been. A speckled line of blood cut across his face and the exact tousle of his hair at this moment—fresh spatter. Goddess, she hoped, and how strange it was to hope such a thing, that it was _her_ blood.

The spear was all that was left in Hubert’s place. Its tip was not wet from an ambient splash, nor smeared from rolling in the blood puddle, but soaked and dripping from time spent in the warm viscera of a deep stab wound.

Okay, this was, like, _really_ bad.

“Where is he,” Bernadetta croaked, threading her fingers through her hair.

Ferdinand planted his hands in the blood coating the floor, as if digging for the disappeared man. “I—I stabbed him,” he uttered. “He… the lance pierced him, in the ribs. He’s wounded.”

“I _know_!” Bernadetta yelled, her voice going shrill. “I was there! I saw it! Where _is_ he?!”

When Ferdinand met her stare, pain and fear flooded his eyes so severely that they nearly overflowed. “Bernadetta, I… I don’t… I do not know.”

Bernadetta swallowed. She waited for him to say something else, anything to give either of them any hope. He did not.

“Okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice from squeaking. “Then… then we just get out of here. Okay.”

Ferdinand staggered to his feet, jaw dropped. “We cannot leave without him!” he protested.

“Ferdinand, it’s _Hubert_!” she screamed, swinging her fists out to throw her voice as loud as possible without it breaking. “It’s Hubert, right?! It’s _Hubert_. If he got himself stabbed and teleported, then he has a plan, and we just have to trust he’s gonna be okay, and make sure we’re okay, too! That’s what he’s trusting _us_ to do! Okay?!”

Ferdinand’s mouth snapped shut. He nodded quickly and silently, planting a hand on the axe looped in his belt.

She was not expecting him to have more confidence in her than, frankly, she had in herself.

“Will you be alright with the spear?” Ferdinand asked. “Do you not have a bow to use?

Bernadetta looked down at her clenched hands, and the lance running through them. She did not remember picking it up. She stared at the bloody point, at her own palm smeared with residual blood from Hubert’s sacrifice. After a long, if not deep, breath through her nose and out her mouth, she glanced around the room, and back towards her bedroom.

Years ago, when she had lived here—when she had been _trapped_ here, a helpless child—she had never slept soundly without a training bow and a few arrows hidden near her bed in case of imaginary assailants. “But my dad cleared out my entire _closet_ except for stuff like…” She gestured down at the skirts she had tied at her waist in desperation, and the boots she tottered in only slightly less than the too-narrow heels he had encouraged (forced) her to wear before. “If there was still a bow around here, I think he got rid of it.”

Ferdinand followed her hands down across her makeshift battlewear and gave a grim nod. “It will be as it was with Hubert, then,” he said. “I will lead. We will go out through the servants’ passages. Is it behind the shelf?”

Bernadetta started to point to the bookshelf before her hand faltered and she clutched it back to her chest. “It’s behind the bookshelf now, but they said—the servants—some of the servants tried to—” She stammered over the words she did not quite yet believe, despite all of the evidence she had witnessed through knocks and muffled voices through the wall. “They tried to get me _out_. But they—the other, the bad guys, they barred up the door from the other side, too.”

“Oh, that?” said Ferdinand, softly beaming. “I personally removed those bars perhaps twenty minutes ago. We were not able to push past the bookshelf without endangering you, but the way should be cleared for our exit now.”

Bernadetta blinked. She remembered the scuffling she had heard in the walls, the scratching that she had no choice but to listen to, even as it conjured fear after horrible fear in her head.

“That was—You guys were—I thought,” she stammered, “I thought you were giant rats.”

Chuckling, Ferdinand made his way to the bookshelf. “Do not be silly. Hubert, perhaps, but not I.”

With a braced stance, he began to push the bookshelf along the wall from one side. Bernadetta came to the other side to help by pulling, but he told her instead to hold the front of the shelf and keep it from toppling. He had only shoved it a few inches, not even half of a foot, before the situation changed yet again.

From outside the room came an eerie, low rumble. After years of resisting warfare—after a single, catastrophe-ridden year at Garreg Mach—Bernadetta knew the sound of that growl anywhere, even within the walls of her childhood home. Still, she asked—she had thought Hubert and Ferdinand were a pair of raccoons or possums, after all—she had to confirm: “Is that…?”

Ferdinand was staring towards the main door to her chambers, as well, the one he had blockaded with chair and table. “It… it could not be,” he insisted.

She could not fault him. That was the answer that she wanted to hear. He was her voice of reason, because any voice was more reasonable than the one running loops within her own head. The _thud_ that crashed into her door, rattling that chair and table, told them both that her fantastical fears, this time, were true.

“Demonic beasts,” she yelped, tugging at the shelf. “It’s demonic beasts, I don’t know how they’re here, but it’s—”

The next sound of impact was louder, but overshadowed by the treble creak of wood beginning to splinter. Prying her hands off of her ears, Bernadetta turned back to the door again, peering at it with one squinting eye. The door had a bulging arc in the center, run through with black cracks through the wood, where something very, very big had rammed into it.

“Bernadetta, back,” Ferdinand yelled.

She felt the shove against her shoulder and staggered away from it, but looked around and did not know where she was to go, what she was retreating from.

“Towards the door!” Ferdinand shouted, gripping the shelf with both hands. An angry scowl painted his face.

She stumbled away from him in uncertain steps, then turned to the door, now splintering like a thousand interlaced fingers coming unfolded, the veneer of varnish giving way to pale, raw wood. They looked a little like teeth, she thought, less than a second before a monstrous, enormous, wet mouth of fangs chewed through the wood like paper. She could not even react (and all the better, because reacting by scrambling backward would have killed her) before a massive, shattering crash hit the floor behind her as the bookshelf toppled over, smashing the chair that she had spent too much of her childhood tied to into splintering planks. In less than a second, her old bedroom had fallen to pieces.

If there were one good thing Bernadetta could say about herself, it was that her fight or flight instincts were top-notch. She certainly favored flight a lot more than fight, sure, but when something incapacitated her ability to flee—in this case, a lack of exits and a notable deficiency in available blood volume—Goddess, did she fight.

With a scream she heard less from within herself and more from some distant outside, she plunged the spear into the gaping maw of the beast trying to shove its way through her door. The innate barrier that surrounded the beast shimmered as it folded in and crunched under her bloody spearhead, shattered in the first blow. Her second went straight for the throat, where the chitin armor flared away from the beast’s body enough to wedge her spear inside and wrench it loose. Out spewed the thick liquid that she now recognized as blood because she had seen the same ugly, black substance come out of her own body. Only after the dizziness faded from her swimming head did she see the flash fade and realize her crest had triggered.

Indech, much as the old dead saint tried (she liked to think he tried), could not save her. Having to use a spear instead of a distant arrow to strike her marks, even if it offered more control and power, brought her much too deep into the fray. Although only the neck of the beast had forced its way through her battered door, it was a long, agile neck that thrashed in recoil from its critical wound. The bruising blow of its head knocking her off of her feet and onto the floor was nothing compared to the bared teeth, already closing in on the pale, exposed flesh of her thigh, too late to kick away by the time she opened her eyes and found focus—

An even brighter flash ricocheted through the room with a human roar and an inhuman crash. Ferdinand’s axe ripped through the beast’s second barrier and smashed down into its head, and an inch or two through the floor below it, too. Cichol and Indech, two old saints working together, perhaps _they_ could save her.

“Are you alright?” Ferdinand yelled over the screeching of the wounded beast, pulling her up by the arm. The power of Cichol’s crest was more in the flash of its manifestation than in the blow it accompanied: when activated during a precise strike, it blinded the foe for long enough for Ferdinand to back away—and to help Bernadetta retreat, too—without getting struck in the back.

The beastly wailing did not stop by the time Bernadetta was wobbling back to her feet and reaching for the panel in the wall, dusty from its time behind a shelf. She had counted two phases through the beast—two was typical for the lesser beasts—yet here it was, rearing its head for a third go.

“How is it _still alive_?!” she shrieked, tugging at the servants’ door harder and harder when it stopped dead at the base of the bookshelf after opening less than a foot wide. “How did it _get_ here?! We’re _upstairs_! How—”

“Stand back,” Ferdinand barked, pushing her gently away from the door despite the desperation in his voice. “Cover me!”

He reared up axe, battered from its powerful strike, and hacked at the door to tear open the way himself. Bernadetta stood at his back, clutching her spear less like a weapon and more like a bracing bar, useless as it would be against the beast that had slipped one arm—leg? limb?—in through the remnants of the door. It used that leverage to lunge even deeper into her room, teeth snapping only a few threatening feet away from Bernadetta as she stifled a whimpering yelp and cowered against Ferdinand’s warm, firm back. The doorframe was bowing under the pressure, ready to take the wall down with it.

Ferdinand hissed out a consonant that would have carried a crude implication on a less proper man’s lips. She would not have expected such a common swear to be familiar enough in his vernacular that it nearly slipped out in a moment of stress, but if there were ever a moment to say “fuck” for the first time, it was when the bolts holding your axe head in place finally gave out, sending the blade into a weak, rattling, useless spin at the end of the haft, in the middle of your chopping down a blocked door that was your only remaining exit from a room increasingly becoming occupied by a demonic beast.

Bernadetta finished Ferdinand’s thought with an unholy scream: “ _Fuck!_ ”

The temperature in the room began to rise. Her uninvited dinner guest was wearing a hot snarl that meant he wanted to start cooking. The rational part of her brain (however small that part was, at this stage) knew that Ferdinand meant to protect her with the arms he squeezed around her, bracing his body between her and the beast’s flaming mouth. The much larger, panicking part of her brain told her to swing her elbows out against anything pinning her in place and to reach for the narrow escape to the servants’ passage, even with splinters clawing over her bare palms as she grabbed the remnants of the door to pull her forward, through the gap, and into the darkness.

Most of the time, she hated being little, powerless, and weak. At other times, she wished she were even less, taking up no space at all, so small that she was invisible to the naked eye, a passive observer in a world that could no longer hurt her or blame her for her mistakes. Right now, she thought, as she kicked her high heels through the door to open the hole wide enough for Ferdinand, that maybe she was the perfect size all along.

Taking his hands in hers with a desperate squeeze, she pulled him through just as beastfire flooded the room behind him. The sudden snap of momentum slammed them both stumbling into a wall. Before Ferdinand could step back, before he could stutter out a nervous apology, Bernadetta was already racing down the dark passage.

Until she came to an intersection, and then she was not.

“Straight ahead, Bernadetta!” Ferdinand called. “Worry not, I know the way to—”

He gave her a soft nudge when he caught up to her, urging her on. When she still did not move, he stopped with her, and followed her eyes down the other hall in the intersection. His breath hitched.

“Ah, is that the young Master Aegir? It has been a long time.”

Ferdinand’s arms slipped around Bernadetta on either side. The spear she had abandoned, he had taken up, and he braced it in front of her now. He meant to protect her, she knew this, with that small rational part of her brain. That small part was getting even smaller, slowly suffocating under the panicking part that said she was trapped, blocked in, tied in place.

“I hear you have pledged yourself to the Church in the fight against the tyrant,” _he_ said, stepping closer. “You are one of the few nobles left with any sense, I say.”

“Count Varley, I ask you to halt,” Ferdinand ordered. The threatening rumble to his voice—it was safe, safe, _safe_.

“We are all on the same side, Lord Aegir. All of us were imprisoned here by the tyrant’s will, for the crime of disagreeing with her.”

Another step forward. The floor creaked, and Bernadetta jumped as if a bomb had gone off.

“Our stances are _not_ the same,” Ferdinand stated firmly, ushering Bernadetta a step backward for each step _he_ took towards her. “I will wrest this country from Edelgard’s hands. I shall take my place as Prime Minister, not by birthright, but by merit. And under my regime, you will remain under house arrest for the rest of your life.”

“Then you are as much a tyrant as Her Imperial Majesty.”

That face. That _face_ , that dark expression of _you said something wrong_ , Bernadetta knew it in the deepest, darkest pits of her stomach, synonymous with chafing tightness and raps against her knuckles and knocks against her ears and _stupid_ , being so _stupid_ and worthless and irredeemable—

“Will you not acknowledge your own daughter?” Ferdinand uttered. “Neither in the ways you have wronged her, nor even her presence, right here and now?”

Bernadetta flinched again. She withered under any gaze, because every moment of eye contact was ruined by the memory of his judging stare. She could not bear it again, not here, not now—

His face moved. His eyes moved, too. They all pointed towards her. But it was like he was looking through her, not seeing her at all. He judged nothing. He saw nothing. She was nothing to him.

She closed her hands around the lance Ferdinand held in front of them. She twisted it from his grip and stepped forward. She did not have a plan. She did not even have words. All she had was a hot, burning feeling in her chest that could only be expressed with a shaking spearhead pointed towards her father.

When the new regime took over the Empire, the old Marquis von Vestra had fallen as a casualty. The rumors said it was Hubert’s own hand that took his life. Since then, Bernadetta had wondered darkly about patricide, about complete freedom from the man who had ruined her childhood and still haunted her as a spectre in her adulthood, about the righteousness of being his judge, jury, and executioner, about whether she could live with his blood on her hands. She could not distinguish her innate guilt from the fear of being found out, somehow, by someone, punished somehow— _still_ the spectre of her father haunted her—and decided, ultimately, that she could not take his life.

But she could walk towards him with a lance aimed at his throat until he stepped back, edging him all the way down the hall, waiting for real, honest fear to break across his self-assured face. And she could feel very, very powerful, stronger than she had ever felt in her life, strong enough to demand in a voice that barely quaked, “Where are you keeping my weapons?”

He did not answer. She knew he would not. It was part of his ongoing rule, that she was not to speak to her superiors without being spoken to.

She took another step forward. He had no room left to walk; he had backed into the servants’ door to his chambers. She inched the spear point nearer and nearer to the flesh under his chin.

As a loophole, he looked up towards Ferdinand, and quickly ground out, “Her bow is in the armory.”

She ripped what catharsis and closure she could get from the moment. With a motion too quick for him to anticipate, she raised up the spear and swung it like a bat, knocking him in the ugly, balding head with the shaft, as she screamed, “I hope you _die_!”

And, yes, after that she fled for her very life all the way through the passages with her heart beating a mile a minute, but still, it felt good.

“Where is the armory?!” Ferdinand called after her as she pounded down the rickety stairs.

“Uh—um, front—I—” she sputtered uselessly, because fear was thick as tar in her head and just as obfuscating.

“I will just follow you!” he called.

Oh.

It was so simple. Perhaps she was so accustomed to the absolute disregard for her individuality, her personhood, her wants and needs, that the bare minimum in small kindnesses and accommodations felt like love, but she felt it.

Outside, everything was on fire.

“Oh,” said Ferdinand when he caught up to where she had stopped just outside the door.

Plumes of thick, black smoke hung over the entire western sky. She could hear the crackling of fire from here, and the air reeked of ash.

“Um,” she said.

They walked up the outer stairs to come up to ground level. From there, they could see the bright orange engulfing the west garden. Down the road to the west manor, a number of servants stood watching the blaze, carrying a few buckets of water that could do absolutely nothing for a fire of this size.

“I am… sorry?” Ferdinand said in a curious tone, then shook his head. “Never mind. Let us hurry. Can we still get to the armory from here?”

She would not have had them bother with the armory were it not on the other side of the front gatehouse, opposite the stables, where they would need to secure horses to make their escape, anyway. Servants and guards ran amok across the grounds, evacuating house officials and setting up blockades to prevent the west garden from spreading its fire further. None batted an eye at Bernadetta and Ferdinand fleeing through the commotion, even with her weird thigh-high boots and fancy dress and suspicious hood hanging over her head and, not to mention, both of them were splashed all over with blood.

It was all going too well. That was her doom-and-gloom way of thinking, but it was hard not to listen to that little nagging voice when it kept being right.

Waiting inside the otherwise eerily empty gatehouse stood a lone dark mage with withering, pale skin. Bernadetta knew them from the sound of their rasping chuckle when they laid black eyes upon her and Ferdinand. Instantly, her spear went up, ready to fight. She had glimpsed little of them until now, too busy being tied in a chair with her back to the door and needles in her veins.

“That’s Periander,” she said in a hushed panic, only to hear Ferdinand saying the same to her as he tried to reach for the lance, himself.

It was logical for him to take the lance. He had more experience with it, and far greater strength. She should have given it to him.

Instead, she thought about her father’s neck at the end of her spear point, about slowly bleeding out for days under this horrible mage’s command, about how her ankles hurt from wearing tight dress shoes and being tied to chair legs and then running across the grounds in heels, about how many people she had killed already in this stupid war, and this was the closest she had ever come in her life to wanting to kill another one. She wrenched the spear away from Ferdinand’s hands, her eyes not leaving Periander for a moment, and told him, “Give me a ward.”

Periander cast a miasma spell faster than Ferdinand could get his gloves off. Bernadetta ducked and rolled under it, emerging from the black cloud right in front of Periander. They knocked away her first thrust with the lance with a swing of their arm, only to leave a massive opening in their chest for her surprise second strike.

They warped a backstep away to lessen the blow, but blackened blood streamed down the hand they clutched to their breast. “Disgusting humans,” they spat, raising their other hand to call forth dark magic. “Whether it is today or tomorrow, we _will_ have our revenge on you.”

Bernadetta was bracing for another miasmatic blast, until their existence began to flicker. They did not intend to attack. They intended to flee.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” she howled, charging forward with the spear and with fury. “Today, _Bernie_ gets revenge on _you_!”

Bernadetta had never fully gored someone with a lance before. In all honesty, it was an unsettling sensation that reminded her too much of the fragility of humans. With all her rage channeled into her arms, she forced the spearhead through the layers of the body, feeling the fleshy layer of skin push against her, then the creepily soft stretch of internal organs, then skin again, and then it was just a pierced hole that the shaft of the spear could fully slip through, almost without resistance. And then she had a body impaled on a stick, life flagging from it, just hanging from her hands.

She dropped the spear. It and Periander clattered to the ground, each as lifeless as the other. The backs of her hands were black with their strange blood. When her tunnel vision cleared and she turned around, Ferdinand looked absolutely horrified.

She wilted. “I, uh,” she stammered, pointing vaguely in two opposite directions. “Armory. The stable is—um. Yeah. I’ll just. Go.”

“Wait,” said Ferdinand weakly. “I… I know where Hubert is.”


	8. But if you packed your bags, who would share my warmth?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Bandcamp day, Juneteenth edition! From now until 12 AM PDT, all proceeds from Bandcamp purchases will be donated to the NAACP Legal Defense fund. Pay your retributions by buying your favorite tunes. Once again, I will support your decision not to stan Lo-ghost if you instead purchase from Black artists.
> 
> But if you do want to stan Lo-ghost, today's title is a lyric from their song, [The Blue](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/the-blue).

Ferdinand’s fingertips half-slipped, half-scraped across the surface of the stone slab as the nerves shook his hands. He had taken off his gloves in vain, because Bernadetta von Varley had thoroughly eliminated the source of dark magic before he could even cast a ward to protect her. In all circumstances they had traversed through so far, she had done a far better job protecting herself than he. She owed most of it to her own incredible strength, both the obvious physical and the subtle inner: so afraid, and yet unflappable in the face of danger. If there were ever a moment that she could have benefited from Ferdinand’s protection, he failed to come to her aid, for entirely foolish reasons. At every opportunity, he could do nothing but gawk at the resilient young woman standing tall, taking charge, fighting with a weapon that she had little more than a novice’s experience with, and wearing elegant, noble dress in a way that quite possibly changed his life.

He really, really could not stop staring at her dress. And her boots. And the small, scandalous space of skin between them. The more blood she got on her, the more he stared. He was not ready for his life to change _that_ much, so he tried very, very, very hard not to think about it.

“How did he get in there?” Bernadetta asked as her heels clicked across the floor towards him. “Wait. Stupid question. He teleported. But _why_ did he get in there?”

“His plan,” Ferdinand began, as what grip he had on the bar slipped away from him again with a clumsy clatter of the stone weight rattling in its hooks. “When he freed me from here—”

Bernadetta’s horrorstricken face whirled on him, already pale from bloodloss and growing paler. “ _You_ were in here?” she squeaked.

“Only for a short while!” Ferdinand promised, holding his dusty, scraped hands up in some effort to soothe her, then shoving them right back under the stone bar again. “A night, at most. Hubert lured a guard down here and killed him to set me free. When he did, he said that he was creating the illusion of a traitorous guard, whom he killed in self-defense. That was the only time he used magic. What he said before, about the dark magic in your blood covering the signal of his warp—I never realized why he had us bar this door after leaving, until—”

Bernadetta reached past Ferdinand to press the heel of one palm into the corner of the stone slab. She hefted it up with one strong, smooth motion, rotating it up out of its hooks. Gravity pulled it through the rest of the motion with two tremendous, thundering claps against the floor, one when the short edge slammed into it at a spot Ferdinand now realized was lined with cracks and scuffed, and another when the long edge slapped down and rattled. Between the two of them both grabbing desperately for the door, they flung it wide open.

The shock of light bursting into the cellar illuminated only a short stretch of stairs until it fell to the darkness. Misshapen asymmetry drew Ferdinand’s eye to the shadows’ tapering edges. Time and focus distinguished the stairs and walls from the shape of something softer, alive or at least once alive, but Ferdinand was already racing down the stairs before he recognized Hubert lying motionless across the steps.

He felt stiff as a corpse when Ferdinand, crumpling to a staggered kneel beside him, rolled him off of his stomach to see his face. What dim light made it to the two of them shined over the slick of blood under Hubert’s ribs, the wound that had done him in before he could reach the top of the stairs. Ferdinand could not keep his hands from clenching, as if a tight grip could hold Hubert to this mortal coil. The worst of it was the way his hair lay when his head lolled, the thick curls falling away from the side he finger-combed them towards, exposing the raw, cracked-porcelain skin from the hypnotic ridge of his cheekbone down to the vulnerable softness of his neck beneath the sharp corner of his jaw. After five years of being, in Ferdinand’s mind, more idea than reality, Hubert was now so utterly human, in his limp weight, his terrifying fragility, his sudden mortality, and the twisted beauty in it all.

His face was cold with sweat when Ferdinand cupped it with a ginger hand, but hot underneath: flesh and blood, despite looking like nothing more than bone. He tilted Hubert’s heavy head towards him to hear the whispering breaths come from his lips, then to catch the edge of the light on the curious malady running across his skin. The shadows ebbed under his jaw and his cheekbones. Ferdinand bent his head low, closer, looking at all the wrong things and not realizing it until he could smell the poison of dark magic mixed with a heady musk that made him part his lips, just slightly, quivering forward, hungry for touch.

Oh.

_Oh._

Bernadetta sucked in a startled gasp when Ferdinand reared his head back up so quickly. “Oh my gosh,” she squeaked, “is he dead? No, no, no, he’s _dead_ , isn’t he, he’s already—”

“N—no, that is not it,” Ferdinand frantically assured her through at least two cracks in his voice, “he is—’”

As she made a sudden grab for Hubert’s wrist, perhaps to feel his pulse for herself, Ferdinand had the nagging sense that the white shape of his hand looked somehow not quite right, and then several things happened at once to help Ferdinand forget the realization at the forefront of his mind.

Hubert’s body jolted in his lap, as a wretched, ragged scream ripped from his throat. Shrieking loud enough to rattle the walls, Bernadetta nearly leapt to her feet, but tottered in her heels and scrambled halfway up the stairs on her hands and legs like a crab. “It is alright!” Ferdinand called out to soothe them both, reaffirming his grip on Hubert with a gentle rub against his back. “Hubert—”

He did not get the chance to speak another word. “ _No,_ ” Hubert snarled, elbowing weakly against Ferdinand’s hold. “Warp. I have to warp.”

“Hubert, it is alright,” Ferdinand said, keeping his voice gentle and his arms firm, no matter how wildly Hubert wriggled against him. “It is _us_ —Ferdinand and Bernadetta. We have come to help you.”

“No,” Hubert hissed again. “You’re too—too late.”

“Hubert, look at me,” Ferdinand coaxed, holding his face still to find focus in his darting eyes. “You are badly injured, but you will be alright. I can heal you. Hubert…”

Hubert looked Ferdinand directly in the eye with unbridled vitriol before shoving his elbow into his face.

“Enbarr,” he gasped as he pulled away from Ferdinand in that startled second. “I must protect—warn Her Majesty.”

When Ferdinand snaked his arm around Hubert’s waist from behind to keep him from escaping, Hubert responded this time with unkindly-aimed kicks. Ferdinand held on despite it, because in Hubert’s voice, he heard a horrible strain much different from when he was merely wounded. “What happened?” Ferdinand asked. “We can help you, Hubert.”

“You want her _dead_ ,” Hubert roared, and he twisted around in Ferdinand’s grip to face him with one hand cradled protectively to his chest, misshapen and bloodier than the one curling into a fist and coming rapidly closer to Ferdinand’s right eye.

Certainly Ferdinand had been hit by harder punches before, and even ones with just as much fiery emotion behind them. He was stunned more by the desperation it signified, the absolute mess that Hubert had devolved into, that he would throw hands instead of words, spells, or knives—his usual favorites.

“Hubert,” Ferdinand said softly, raising in surrender the hand he was not pressing to his cheekbone. “What happened?”

Hubert held his glare for only a half-second before his shaking knee gave out underneath him. He surrendered to a slump along the stairs, panting his words and barely fighting Ferdinand’s arms as they came to support his weight.

“Periander,” he uttered. Ferdinand had never heard him sound so defeated, his voice as heavy as his body. “They found me out. Lady Edelgard—the Empire will fall.” His dark, weak laughter sounded thick and wet in his throat, near to coughs as his head sank to his chest. “You win the war. Rejoice.”

“Was it… _only_ Periander?” Ferdinand asked. “Bernadetta just, ah, killed them. Minutes ago.”

In the still, silent moment after he dropped those words, while Hubert was stunned speechless and motionless, Ferdinand stole a glance up the stairs to Periander’s killer. Bernadetta had curled into the shape of the purse she used to carry, small and withdrawn, yet all sharp with tension, eyes blown wide with terror.

“Is e-everything, um, good now?” she said shakily. “Because. I—I need to go. I need to _go_ , and not, um, be here right now?”

Ferdinand blinked. “Everything is fine, Bernadetta,” he said gently. “There is no need to run. There is nothing to fear.”

“I know! I _know_ there’s nothing to fear, and that’s _always_ my problem,” Bernadetta yelled, threading her fingers tightly through her hair, “but I’m still afraid, and I really, really, really need to go, I’m going, sorry, I’m going, I’m _going_!”

She repeated all of those last words in a pitch and volume rising with each of the remaining steps she took out of the dungeon, all through Ferdinand protesting for her to stop, to wait, to listen to him for a moment. The last word she got out before tearing off down the hall was, “Armory!” as some sort of explanation, and then it was just the clicking of her heels fading away. The last words Ferdinand hoped she could hear were in his plaintive call, “Be safe.” He did not yet know what made her tick, or what made her explode, but he was learning that the best course, when all else failed, was to follow the one that she charted and wish her well.

“They weren’t with anyone,” slurred Hubert, almost too softly to break the falling silence.

“What?” Ferdinand whispered, shifting his arms to tilt Hubert’s muffled face to the open air. Pain flashed across his features with the movement. Ferdinand sparked a healing spell in his fingertips, pressing the first into the hole he had inadvertently torn into Hubert’s chest.

“Time,” Hubert said on a raspy breath. “What time is…”

“I do not know the time,” Ferdinand murmured. “Can you not draw your watch? What has happened to your hand?”

“How many minutes since…?”

He trailed off, but Ferdinand carried his meaning. “I do not think your time limit has yet expired,” he said, “though it may soon.” He rubbed his thumb along Hubert’s skin to feel the wound undone, breathing a sigh of relief. “What do you need to do before then? Can I help you?”

Hubert did not answer. “Minutes,” he mumbled incoherently. “They couldn’t have… They’re _dead_.”

Bit by bit, the tension melted from his battered body as it sank deeper and more comfortably into Ferdinand’s arms. Silent, Ferdinand cast another healing spell over the stretched expanse of Hubert’s inflamed skin along his neck as his head rolled to rest in the crook of Ferdinand’s elbow. He could feel the reserves of his faith running thin through his veins, but the surface-level lesions marring Hubert’s skin were thinner. Though the redness was slower to fade, the irritant dark magic and its sores disappeared under Ferdinand’s hand like oil from the surface of water with the mere touch of soap.

Raising his elbow, he slid a tentative hand behind Hubert’s head, cradling it to reach the skin on the back of his neck. His breaths went shallow through his lips—goddess forbid he breathe through his nose again, not after last time—as he held deathly still through the wonder of Hubert lying pliant, dare he say _comfortable_ in his arms, head tucked under his chin.

“Are you alright?” Ferdinand said as loud as he dared; his voice barely rose above a whisper. “Your hands…”

Hubert grunted in reply, pulling the one close to his chest again. “It can’t be healed,” he muttered. “Broken. Needs setting.”

Despite having absolutely no experience whatsoever with healing broken bones, let alone setting them properly before healing them, Ferdinand promised, “When we are safe and far from here, I will treat it myself. Can you stand?”

In his weakened state, he struggled with his own weight and balance. Ferdinand fit easily at his side, keeping his arms and shoulders sturdy. He felt worthy, needed, _complete_ when Hubert leaned on him for support, pressing a little heavier with each step up the stairs.

At the very top, just as he was reaching out to push open the door, Bernadetta’s low, shaking voice bit through the silence on the other side with a sharp-toothed, “Back away or I-I’ll shoot.”

It was not over. Of course it was not over. It had not been easy so far, by any stretch of the imagination—guards, a demonic beast, Periander themself, all while fighting through bloodloss, sleep deprivation, and lately hunger—but of course there would be more for them to fight.

Before Ferdinand could reach the door, Hubert surged forward into it, shoving it open with his freefalling weight. Gravity brought him past the swung-wide door to his hand and knees, gasping through something thick and wet as he hunched over the ground, right in the crossfires between four soldiers, standing over Periander’s corpse, and the lone Bernadetta, nocking two arrows in her bow as a bluff more than a threat.

Hubert ragdolled with petulant weight and stiffness when Ferdinand tried to haul him up and over to Bernadetta, their only ready line of defense. Ferdinand did not understand where the sudden resurgence of stubbornness had come from, nor why it had come at a perilous moment that most required their teamwork, until he had wrenched Hubert back to his feet and one of the soldiers cried out, “Lord Vestra!”

Ferdinand puffed air from his lips to shift hair out of his face, some his, some Hubert’s. Though his recognition was spotty, the context filled in the rest. These were Hubert’s soldiers, the ones who had ridden with them from Enbarr on this mission, but had been left in the dark about its details. And now they were advancing with weapons drawn.

Ferdinand hesitated, unsure of how to proceed, whether to consider the soldiers on their side or against them, or neither. Then Hubert raised his arm with the flash of a blade emerging from his sleeve, concealed in his palm, and Ferdinand realized that perhaps he should not so readily assume that even _Hubert_ was still on his side after this sudden shift in the tides. Before Hubert could extract the knife from his sleeve with swipes from his mangled hand—Goddess, in the light, he could see the difference between where blood had splashed onto the glove and where blood had soaked into the fabric from the _inside_ —Ferdinand snatched it in self-defense. Locking Hubert firmly against his chest, he extended his arm to hold it out of Hubert’s reach, resisting the desperate tugging at his sleeve.

The soldiers stopped in their tracks, eyes following the knife, just as Ferdinand heard a slow, hissing message slip past Hubert’s gritted teeth and into his ear: “Hold it against my _neck_ , you absolutely _insufferable_ —”

Ferdinand snapped his elbow back so quickly it drew a hiss and a line of blood from Hubert’s throat. He flinched when he realized it, choking down an apology. They were faking a hostage scenario.

“Hey, okay!” said the soldier at the front of their formation, sheathing his sword with one hand and raising the other in complacence. “Easy with that! What do you want?!”

Ferdinand wanted to leave this place in one piece, preferably with Bernadetta, and selfishly with Hubert, if only for one moment of clarity between them, one honest heart-to-heart to clear his conscience and find closure. If Hubert had no more whispered instructions for his ear, then he was going to seize his chance.

“Do not move,” he commanded the soldiers as he took a step back towards Bernadetta, dragging Hubert with him in a stagger that was less fake than he would have liked. “Or she fires, and I will slit his throat.”

Hubert grabbed Ferdinand’s forearm with a shaking grip, exaggerating a tug-of-war between them in which Ferdinand was not actually participating, and left it positioned such that the knife at a different spot on his neck—where the carotid artery, and thus an actual threat, lay. Ferdinand gave a slight nod to indicate he had received the message and held the knife steady at the corrected position.

He took another step back that Hubert struggled to follow. Still the soldiers stayed put. He inched himself and Hubert backwards, step by heavy step, until they were behind Bernadetta’s drawn bow. Ferdinand flicked his eyes to her, and she looked back. The glances said nothing; they were both empty of anything but sheer panic. Perhaps it conveyed reassurance that they were each equally as out of their depth as the other.

The soldiers must have sensed it, or Ferdinand must have crossed some threshold of distance they felt safe to tamper in, because in his next backward step, their armor shifted and their hands went to their weapons. Ferdinand seized up, wondering if he had the healing magic left to go through with his claim to slit Hubert’s throat and patch it up later, when Hubert came to their rescue again.

“Stand down,” he rasped, straining his voice to be heard. “They have nothing to lose. My death would—” He coughed, and reached for Ferdinand’s arm again, pulling it not as part of the ruse, but to stay _upright_. “It’s still their victory. Don’t call this bluff. Send word to Her Majesty if I… if I don’t…”

Hubert’s voice went faint at the end, and so did his body, listing to one side. Gripping tightly, Ferdinand took another step back more hastily than he would have liked. The name of the game now was speed: getting Hubert out of this hostage negotiation before he keeled over.

Bernadetta glanced over her shoulder and scrambled back when she realized how far Ferdinand had gone without her. As soon as she was back within whispering range and the Empire soldiers were safely outside it, he whispered, “Which way to the stables?”

Hubert was still conscious enough to make a scoffing sound of exasperation. Ferdinand tried to take that as a positive.

“I-I’ll lead,” Bernadetta whispered back, eyes trained on the four motionless soldiers.

She did not lead fast enough. Ferdinand had to follow the cue of her movements—tending to the right with each backward step—to figure out which of the wide doorways in the entrance hall was meant for horses. As soon as he had rounded its corner, he fell into a crouch and slid one foot forward. Hubert folded under his own suddenly unsupported weight and collapsed near-perfectly over Ferdinand’s back. Ferdinand wriggled his shoulders to distribute Hubert’s weight comfortably. Holding a thigh in one hand and a bicep in the other for security, he slowly stretched his legs and stood.

“ _No_ ,” Hubert said with dark menace when he found himself dangling in the air.

“Shh,” Ferdinand hushed urgently. They were out of sight, but perhaps not out of earshot, and most certainly not out of the fire.

Bernadetta’s eyes flicked rapidly between them and her arrows’ target as she made her last few sidesteps towards their exit. As soon as her head got behind it, she looked at Ferdinand, at the exact moment that he glanced back to survey the path behind him. When their eyes met again, they nodded their mutual understanding. The second that the tip of Bernadetta’s arrow withdrew from the hall, they tore off at a sprint.

“There’s two horses ready in tack!” Bernadetta called behind her when she reached the stable before Ferdinand, who was laden with near-dead weight. “I don’t recognize them, but—”

Two would be enough, and any two would do if they were already dressed to ride. Ferdinand kicked open the stable door that had fallen shut behind Bernadetta and wrestled himself and Hubert through it to find Bernadetta leading by the bridle the two horses on which Hubert and Ferdinand had ridden into Varley.

“They are Hubert’s,” Ferdinand identified immediately, if the way their big noses turned anxiously towards the semiconscious black lump on his shoulders was not indication enough. “Bernadetta, mount the dark stallion. He is stubborn, but confident, and will lead you well. If you ride with Hubert, he will be calm and pliant.”

Bernadetta scrambled up into the saddle more like a child playing polo than a warrior, but she pulled her feet from the stirrups and scooted in front of the saddlehorn with the same agility and flexibility. Ferdinand gave a reassuring, grounding pat to the stallion’s haunch before depositing Hubert into the back of his saddle. Bernadetta had to clutch him around the waist to keep him from slipping off before he could get his first foot in the stirrup.

“Why are your horses still in tack, Hubert?” Ferdinand asked as he manhandled Hubert’s legs into proper riding position. “Do not tell me you did not have them dressed down after our ride last night?”

“Ferdinand,” Hubert uttered wearily, a few degrees of rotation away from an eye roll, or perhaps his eyes were just seconds away from rolling into the back of his head.

“It is unhealthy for a horse to stay bridled with a riding bit for such a long period in any circumstance,” Ferdinand went on, almost unconsciously checking and adjusting the straps and buckles as he spoke, “but especially after as grueling a ride as we put them through yesterday! You should _never_ —”

“Ferdinand,” said both Bernadetta and Hubert in unison.

His teeth clacked together when he snapped his mouth shut. Right. Priorities. He could lecture Hubert about his horsecare when they were not under hot pursuit.

He tugged the horses both by their bridles to the pasture-side door. “Head for Aegir,” he said as he corraled them. “Take the southern road to the Varley River, cross, and follow it eastward.”

“Hubert, you can lean on me, it’s okay,” Bernadetta said softly.

Hubert, pale as death, blinked his bleary eyes at her as if trying to focus his vision. He had his remaining hand clenched on the saddlehorn, the other gingerly resting atop it, and his entire swaying body anchored tenuously to it. His arm trembled as he tried to ease his weight off of it enough to let go of the saddle and latch onto Bernadetta’s waist instead. She reached up behind her to coax his head into her shoulder. The eye contact they made, just before he closed his eyes and surrendered to rest, put to shame the most devout and loving of couples in all of history.

“Um, southern. Then east,” Bernadetta repeated nervously as her stallion nosed out into open air. “South?”

Ferdinand swallowed, but it did not clear the lump from his throat. “Ride at a three-beat with the sun at your right until you hit water and you cannot go astray,” he said hoarsely. “I will be right behind you—go.”

She nodded at him, eyes full of something he did not understand but that looked like an apology. Then she kicked off with a stern shout, and she and Hubert were galloping off into the distance. Hubert’s mare, still in Ferdinand’s hand, started forward when she saw her partner leave with her master, but he held her back by the reins with a soothing word.

“I know, sweet lady,” he said, running the backs of his fingers along her copper-haired neck. “It is hard for me to see them go, too, even if only for a moment.”

To be polite, he did not make her turn to face him, but instead stood in front of her, holding her face gently in both hands to check the fit of her bridle and position of her bit.

“Now, I know you are Hubert’s favored travel horse,” he said in a low, serious voice. “This means that you and I most certainly will not get along. But I am willing to set aside my differences with you for this ride, for the sake of someone we both—”

He almost said the word. He choked it back.

“We both care deeply about,” he said instead, as if that were any less damning. “Will you swear to do the same, sweet one?”

She responded by turning her nose towards one of Ferdinand’s hands and pulling back her lips. Ferdinand had seen and experienced enough of horse teeth to train a reflex that yanked both of his hands quickly back and up over his head.

“You devious trollop,” he hissed at her.

She leaned forward to sniff at his coat, particularly the shoulder onto which Hubert had smeared much of his blood. Ferdinand looked at his bloodstained hands and wondered if they carried the identifiable scent of Hubert.

“Ah, you are simply worried about him, aren’t you?” he cooed, stroking her pink, velvety nose as it gently wandered over his person. “I understand. I am worried, too.”

Her nose stopped at the bag on his hip, and then she opened her mouth again.

“No! Avariscious scoundrel!” he scolded, twirling away from her teeth.

She snorted at his rebuff and started to toe off as if bored of the encounter.

“Fine.” Snarling, Ferdinand fished the peppermint sprig he knew she had been smelling from his bag and thrust it out in offering. “If I must buy your loyalty, so be it.”

As she happily chewed on the leaves, he climbed swiftly into her saddle and turned her the right way. Bernadetta and Hubert had long since disappeared into the horizon, a pace Ferdinand worried he would not be able to keep up with, until Hubert’s mare eased into a breakneck gallop with nothing more than an urgent kick and a forward lean.

“Sweet lady,” he praised her again, even if his words blew away into the wind.

House Varley disappeared behind him, still teeming with black smoke from the fires in the gardens. A weight lifted from his shoulders to see it grow smaller and smaller and to see no one—and nothing—following. They had made it out alive. All that was left was to catch up to Hubert and make sure he _stayed_ alive.

And then what?

Ferdinand swallowed and turned his focus back onto the road ahead. He let his thoughts dissolve into the drum of hooves against the dirt, the vibration of each one stirring in his chest, the wind tossing his hair, all the pleasant distractions he always sank into when he went for a ride with a heavy head.

About a mile from the river crossing, much sooner than he had expected, he spotted the shape of a lone horse on the road ahead. Bernadetta and the stallion had slowed to a steady canter since leaving Ferdinand’s sight. Before Ferdinand could move a muscle, the mare underneath him was reading his mind: they accelerated to a sprint until they were almost alongside Hubert and Bernadetta.

“Ferdinand!” Bernadetta called back, struggling to see past Hubert’s head still hanging over her shoulder. “Are they gone? Are they following us?!”

“We are clear,” he reported with a triumphant wave and a beaming smile. “We are about an hour’s ride from a small port town where the Varley River joins with Bergliez. We should be safe to stop and rest there.”

“Can—” Bernadetta shifted her reins to one fist so that she could hold a hand to the loose arm Hubert had curled around her waist. “Can we stop sooner?”

Hubert hung even limper now than when they had first set out to ride. Ferdinand had the mare take a slight lead as he pointed to the approaching Varley River in the distance—at this crossing, nothing more than a small tributary, bridged by a simple structure of wood. “Let us cross here and rest by the riverside,” he suggested.

“Ferdinand,” said Bernadetta, her voice high and wary.

He eased his horse back into a canter and looked behind him. Under Hubert’s hanging head, obscured by his thick, black curls, a spew of pale red was building on the breast of Bernadetta’s white dress. He had been coughing up blood.

Ferdinand pulled hard—perhaps too hard—on the mare’s reins, bringing her to a startled stop. The stallion stopped just as suddenly, partly by Bernadetta’s kinesthetic command, but mostly out of a devotion to follow his partner’s lead. As soon as their momentum died, Hubert was crawling desperately out of the saddle. Fast as he was, Ferdinand could not dismount quickly enough. His boot was still half-caught in a stirrup of a slightly different shape or size than what he was used to when, to the sound of Bernadetta’s squeal of horror, Hubert slid off his horse and immediately crumpled into the dirt.

“Water,” he rasped before Ferdinand, crashing to his knees beside him, could ask.

“You could not have waited five minutes for us to make it to the riverside, where there is water abound?” Ferdinand chided gently. Hubert responded with a spit of pink froth.

“What do we do?” Bernadetta half-whispered to Ferdinand, dragging her fingers down her face. “What do we _do_?!”

Ferdinand pulled a now-empty canteen from his bag and passed it up to Bernadetta before she got any ideas about dismounting. “Fill this at the river,” he said. “Do not worry, Bernadetta. I will take care of him.”

“Okay,” she said, turning the stallion to ride, while Hubert muttered, “That will give her _more_ to worry about.”

“I have taken _excellent_ care of your injuries thusfar today,” Ferdinand protested once Bernadetta’s hoofbeats had died down enough for Hubert to hear him.

“Then why,” Hubert coughed, “am I still dying?”

“If I had to hazard a guess, I would wager that it is because there are injuries you are hiding from me.” With Hubert gathered in his arms, Ferdinand slowly began to stand. “And do not be _dramatic_! You are not _dying_!”

Hubert gripped Ferdinand’s shoulder like life itself, eyes blown wide, breaths hissing through his gritted teeth. “If I am not _dying_ ,” he gasped, “why are you—hauling me like a corpse?!”

“Because I am—taking excellent care of you!” Ferdinand shot back, staggering away from the dirt path with Hubert’s unwieldy and fully uncooperative weight. “We are starting by making sure you are not trampled by a horse and cart while you lie in the middle of the road!”

With a sigh that sounded more like a groan, Ferdinand deposited Hubert underneath a tree, propping his head up against the trunk. Hubert’s mare followed them at a distance with a blank indifference in her eyes that Ferdinand was wont to call blatant disloyalty to her master.

“Now,” Ferdinand exhaled, rubbing his hands together. “Let us try this again. Where are you hurt?”

“Where do you want to start,” Hubert croaked, shooting him a weak smile.

And that smile _did_ something to him. Hubert was so devoid of human kindnesses that the smallest show of affection had his heart racing with the excitement of a victory. When the silence had stretched on too long, Ferdinand stammered, “Your—your hand?”

Hubert winced and shook his head. “Throat,” he requested weakly. “Internal bleeding. Inhaled dark magic.”

Ferdinand tutted as he came to hold Hubert’s face, prying open his jaw to see the sores lining his mouth, the same ones that had afflicted his skin. “You should have told me,” Ferdinand scolded as his barely-recovered white magic crawled its way out of his hands. “This is easy for me to treat. Is it only your throat?”

Hubert could not answer, because Ferdinand was currently filling his throat with white magic, one hand holding his mouth open, the other slowly running down his neck, to his chest, into his lungs. He could not keep his eyes from widening as he felt the damage continue, deeper and deeper, in his digestive tract as well as his respiratory system.

“We will have a lengthy talk later about not only _how_ you hid this from us,” Ferdinand said, “but _why_ you felt the need to. Hubert, you must have been excruciating pain.”

Hubert gave a soft, tired hum in response.

“So why did you not say anything!” Ferdinand demanded.

“I’ll have you know,” he said, voice gravelly in the throes of its recovery, “that I prepared my horses just prior to freeing you from the dungeon. They were only tacked for a couple of hours before we arrived.”

Ferdinand worked his jaw for a while before he lined up his words. “That is good to hear,” he admitted, “but you are changing the subject.”

“It was important that I tell you,” Hubert said simply.

“You are…” Ferdinand shook his head, unable to find a worthy word. He settled on, “An enigma.”

Hubert rolled his head to the side and gazed into the distance with a dark smile. “All in all,” he said, “I would say today’s mission went quite well. Wouldn’t you?”

“Went _well_?” Ferdinand repeated, incredulous. “You were nearly _killed_! We _all_ were nearly killed! You would have died if Bernadetta and I had listened to your orders and left you to fend for yourself!”

“And here I thought _you_ were the optimistic one of the two of us, sickeningly so,” Hubert chuckled. “The odds were stacked against us, and we survived. A bout of good luck, you could say.”

“Good luck,” Ferdinand repeated with derision. “Did you know, after you stranded us in Bernadetta’s bedroom, a demonic beast broke through her door and tried to attack us?! What sort of good luck is that?!”

“Mm. To be expected, when working with Those Who Slither in the Dark,” Hubert said nonchalantly. “The human experimentation I mentioned… Well, let us not get into that.”

Through a chill of cold blood in his veins, Ferdinand demanded, “They were turning humans into beasts inside of House Varley?!”

“They tend to do it wherever they go,” replied Hubert.

“And you did not think to warn me of this before we walked alone into the beasts’ den?!”

“I suddenly seem to recall your telling me that, were we to meet again, you would give me my due thanks,” Hubert gloated.

He had not lifted his sidelong gaze, and here he raised his lame hand in gesture. When Ferdinand turned his head to follow it, he saw her coming, and heard the distant hoofbeats of her arrival.

“She was worth every excruciating second,” Hubert sighed. “Don’t you think?”

As much as he adored her, as much as he realized—in this very second, even—that he might not have much time left with her, he tore his eyes from the vision of Bernadetta riding a black stallion in knee-high boots and a bride’s gown to look deep into Hubert’s eyes, into their uncharacteristic peace, the way they showed a smile more deeply than the quirk of his lips. And Ferdinand closed his eyes, and made up his mind about what needed to be said.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Thank you, Hubert. For helping me to save her.”

Bernadetta all but leapt off the horse, hitting the ground with a stumble on her heels but not missing a beat to keep racing to Hubert’s side. She thrust the flask, filled to the very lip with fresh water, into his face, waiting for him to drink from it like her life depended on it rather than his. When he only took a moderate swig and paused too long to breathe afterward, she shoved the flask back towards his mouth, pleading, “No, no, drink it.”

“It’s—” Hubert sputtered over her actually managing to force the mouth of the canteen between his lips for a moment before he shook free. “Ferdinand healed the affliction in my throat, Bernadetta. I am sated.”

She shot a glance at Ferdinand for his confirmation. “Everyone—everyone’s okay.”

“Safe and as well as can be expected,” he said, eyeing Hubert’s yet-untreated hand.

Bernadetta focused back on Hubert, looking him up and down. “You promise,” she said, voice raw with tears and fears.

He wrapped a hand over hers on the canteen, gently pushing it away. “I swear it.”

“Okay.” She set the canteen down beside her. Voice and lip both quivering, she said, “I’m g-gonna. I’m gonna lose it now.”

Like a flipped switch, she burst into wailing sobs and collapsed into Hubert’s chest to muffle them. Hubert was too tired for the propriety and restraint he had shown the first time she smothered him in her embrace. This time, he crossed his arms behind her back and sighed a hushing sound as he closed his eyes and, knowingly, lovingly, smiled with his head resting upon hers.

Ferdinand had his words. As soon as Bernadetta calmed down, he vowed that he would say them. But before that, Hubert opened his eyes again, and shared that same knowing, loving smile directly with Ferdinand. It burned to look at.

“Bernadetta,” he said softly when his racing heart would let him wait no longer, even though she was still shaking with silent tears in Hubert’s arms. “I will… I will return to the monastery without you. I will tell the rest of the army that I have confirmed that you do not want to fight in the war any longer.”

When he looked up from his tangling fingers, Bernadetta was looking at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes, and Hubert had a bewildered front. “Ferdinand, th-that letter was fake,” she protested. “Didn’t you—I thought you—”

“I know,” he said. “But I see where your heart lies. And… if I may ask—or maybe this is too selfish—I ask that even if you turn to the Empire’s side to be with Hubert…” He squeezed his eyes shut against the tears budding in his own eyes. “It would break my heart too deeply to face you on the battlefield. Please, do not make me fight you.”

“Ferdinand, what in all hells are you talking about?” cut in Hubert in his flat, annoyed voice.

Ferdinand snapped his head up. Bernadetta and Hubert had fallen into an even deeper state of shock since the last time he looked at them, except now both of them—even bone-white Hubert—had pinker cheeks.

“I see it even if you do not,” Ferdinand protested, gesturing at them with both hands. “She loves you, Hubert, and you love her. I will not let the two of you stand on opposite sides of the war.”

“Ferdinand, wait, wait, slow down,” Bernadetta interrupted, waving her hands back and forth before seeming to interrupt _herself_ and clapping her hands to her cheeks. “Oh my gosh, is this what I sound like when I start rambling about stuff? And you tell me to slow down? Oh, Goddess, oh my gosh, you have to deal with this _every time_ I talk, why hasn’t someone, I don’t know, killed me yet? Wait! I didn’t mean I want to kill you, Ferdinand, oh my gosh, oh, no, no, no, I meant, because when I do it, I mean, I, well, when I—”

“Bernadetta,” Ferdinand and Hubert said in unison.

She stifled a squeal by stuffing her fingers in her mouth. “I’m doing it! I’m doing it again right now!”

“Yes,” Hubert answered simply.

“Are… are you going to kill me?”

“Not if you get to the point,” he replied.

She blinked. “Um. The point. Right. Uh, the point is. The point. The point is… what were we talking about?”

“Why it’s absolutely preposterous for anyone to insist that you, I quote, ‘love’ me,” he prompted, rolling his eyes for an excuse to look anywhere but her face.

“No, wait, but I _do_!”

It was funny how much hearing the truth aloud from the source still hurt Ferdinand even when he had been the first one to say it, or perhaps it was just sad.

“I—” She flicked her eyes between the two of them as if waiting for one of them to strike her for speaking. “I always thought—when I was a kid, I always thought, like, marriage was going to be the worst thing to ever happen to me. Even if he wasn’t as mean as my dad said he’d be, I just… I didn’t want to… _be_ with anyone like that. I was terrified of it, really. Until… until I met you guys, and I realized… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, with a husband like both of you.”

Ferdinand swallowed through his suddenly dry throat. “Both… of us?” he repeated. “You mean to say… you… I…”

“I am fairly certain the custom requires you to choose one husband, not two,” Hubert said snidely.

Honestly, the thought that he might be vying for Bernadetta’s affection against Hubert had not crossed Ferdinand’s mind at first. It used to be all he thought of—how to prove to Bernadetta, and more importantly to Hubert, as a point of pride, that he was the superior suitor—and now he was just happy to be loved at all. For all he cared, Hubert could have half of her love. He deserved it.

“ _Fuck_ it!” Bernadetta said in her squeaky little voice, swinging her fists out to her sides. “We’re all fighting for a new Fódlan, anyway! Maybe in that new world, I get to have two whole husbands and no one can yell at me about it!”

Ferdinand snuck a glance at Hubert to see if he could find the other man’s opinion on being one of a set of husbands rather than the sole spouse. Hubert, he found, was doing exactly the same to him. Their eyes widened when they met, and then immediately turned away.

“I see no problem with that,” Ferdinand said in a voice floating somewhat higher than his usual register.

“There is one small issue, but it can be resolved. When the Empire claims victory in the war, I will be sure to take the two of you as prisoners into the harem of House Vestra,” Hubert said with infuriating nonchalance.

Ferdinand could feel his face puffing up with red. It was one thing to be one of multiple husbands; it was another entirely to be reduced to a concubine. _Hubert’s_ concubine.

“You would never,” Ferdinand sputtered.

“Why wouldn’t I?” replied Hubert with a daring look, a look that said, _Yes, I know I have just implied that I would take you into my house as a glorified sex slave, and I stand by it. Your move._

Everything was a chess match with Hubert, even something as tender as matters of the heart. There were entirely too many feelings at play for Ferdinand’s move to be an elegant one. “My house outranks both of yours!” he protested. “I should be the one taking the two of you into _my_ harem!”

“Clearly Bernadetta has the most power of the three of us,” Hubert teased, “for she is the one who holds both of our hearts by the strings.”

“So then, you are saying that I do not hold your heart as you hold mine?”

That sure did come out of Ferdinand’s mouth before he thought about it.

Hubert’s eyes flashed with intrigue. “If you must ask,” he said, tossing his head, “then you do not hold it as tightly as hoped. Shameful, truly—you know that my heart is cold and hard. It may shatter if you drop it.”

“Then do away with these games and strings,” Ferdinand urged, his voice growing low and desperate, “and place your heart in my hands, that I may warm it by the heat of my palms.”

Hubert’s jaw set. Ferdinand watched the Adam’s apple bob in his throat with a swallow. He only spoke after turning his head away: “It would sooner bite your skin with frost. Best to hold it where you have it, at a safe distance.”

“Then I shall wear gloves to handle it, if that is what it takes to keep you closer to me,” Ferdinand pleaded. “Do not pity me for the wounds I will bear to find my way to you. I am more than strong enough to weather them, and they will not be the first I have suffered willingly for your sake.”

“Are… are you guys flirting?”

Their heads both snapped to Bernadetta. She squeaked and slapped her hands over her mouth.

“Oh my gosh, you’re really—oh _no_ , I’m, um—look!” She scooted off of her knees and onto her bottom, and swiveled around to face the other way, clapping her hands over her ears. “Just! Pretend I’m not here! It’s okay, you can k-kiss or something, I don’t mind, I’m not here, bye!”

Hubert winced as he averted his eyes from Ferdinand’s gaze. “Bernadetta, we are not—turn around.”

Ferdinand caught Hubert’s chin in his palm.

Neither of them looked away. Time stretched between them, thick and palpable and pulling each second further from the last, and neither of them looked away. Ferdinand’s heart was climbing up his throat, squeezing more and more beats into every second, choking his breath into thin sounds rushing from his slightly parting lips. A weight was pressing at the back of his head, too heavy to resist, pushing him towards Hubert. Inches away, he feathered his thumb over Hubert’s cheek and touched, barely brushed his bottom lip. A test. A warning. A hungry theft, before he had the courage to claim it in full, of the disarming softness of Hubert’s mouth.

Hubert’s jaw trembled. Ferdinand saw it, and felt it against his hand, and that was the last thing he saw, and the next thing in his hand was a fistful of coarse hair, and Hubert tasted like the stinging sweetness of a concoction and a poison like dark magic and the warmth of a faith-healed wound, and beneath it all, the subtle but deep edge of black coffee. He kissed Ferdinand with the same ravenous ferocity, or more, because something made every inch of his weakened body shake with emotion, from his quivering lips to the quaking hand reaching behind Ferdinand’s neck to drag him in deeper.

It was only a small yelp, but it might as well have been a scream for how suddenly Ferdinand and Hubert snapped apart to turn to Bernadetta as she ducked her face behind her hands in shame.

“Sorry! Sorry! Oh my gosh, I just—” She parted her pinkies to peer between her fingers. “H-Hubert, you said turn around, I thought—I’m sorry!!”

“No, Bernadetta, I—” Ferdinand cut off, pressing his fingers to the foreign wetness covering his lips with a thrill that completely derailed his train of thought. “I… that was…”

“Unbecoming of you?” Hubert finished for him.

“Yes!” Ferdinand exclaimed before he saw the look on Hubert’s face.

It was hard to read behind the layers of plaster where Hubert hid himself, but muted dejection bled through the cracks. He had no teasing smile, and his eyes had fallen low to the ground, away from both Ferdinand and Bernadetta.

“That is to say,” Ferdinand hurried to add, “Bernadetta, that I am sorry to have—engaged in such conduct in your presence, no matter how strong and true my feelings—”

“Um, no,” she said in a small voice, still muffled by the cover of her hands, “it’s not, that wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t bother,” Hubert cut in darkly. “We all know this cannot be. Our places are on opposite sides of a war. Better to forget any feelings, no matter how true you claim them to be.”

“They _are_ true!” Ferdinand insisted.

“You are missing the point as usual, Ferdinand.”

Without a rebuttal ready on his lips, Ferdinand could do nothing but listen to the silence hang heavy over their three heads. He wanted to think of solutions, to come up with a way out of this impossible, stomach-churning quandary. Unfortunately, he licked his lips in the midst of his thoughts and found they still tasted of Hubert, and all he could think of was just one more kiss.

“You’ll never leave the Empire, right?” Bernadetta asked in a hushed voice, rubbing at the puncture wound in the back of her hand from the blood needle.

“I will never feel any devotion greater than that I hold for Her Majesty,” Hubert stated. “Not even the two of you combined could drag me from her side.”

“No, yeah, that’s okay,” Bernadetta said. “I mean, it sucks, because our army’s trying to fight her and everything, but… I get it. I think. Or, well, I kind of get it. I… yeah.”

She trailed off before either Ferdinand or Hubert had to remind her to stop, and fidgeted more with her hands through the silence.

“Would it be just as foolish to ask you to defect from the Church?” Hubert asked.

Ferdinand and Bernadetta each looked at each other for an answer.

“Hmm,” said Hubert, raising an eyebrow. “So it is not an immediate outright refusal. Perhaps we can work with that.”

“I do not support the restoration of the Church of Seiros to its former level of power,” Ferdinand said carefully, “but I cannot condone the actions of Emperor Edelgard against the people of Fódlan.”

“Even after learning that she is not the one responsible?” Hubert said. “That it is the monsters like Periander who have incited their suffering?”

“Yet you _ally_ with them!” Ferdinand’s voice choked up in this frustrated outcry; he blinked back wetness in his eyes. “Whether the actions were your own or your ally’s, you must take responsibility for them! Must you continue to work with such heinous people, knowing full well the horrors they commit?! Capturing and torturing Bernadetta to collect her blood—turning humans into demonic beasts—and _whatever_ it is that they did to Edelg—”

“They overpower us, Ferdinand,” Hubert interrupted, gritting his teeth to bite back the ferocity in his voice. “I spend every spare second investigating them, finding _any_ clues I can about their whereabouts and technologies so that one day, we might be able to topple them with the advantage of insight and surprise, and even then just barely. We have no power to make demands of them at this time, and the situation is much too tenuous and much too dangerous to simply nullify a treaty and call it a day.”

“Do you say this only because it would bruise your pride to abandon your most powerful ally and risk losing the war?!” Ferdinand accused.

Hubert’s nostrils flared. Before he could open his mouth, Bernadetta’s arm came slashing down between them.

“Stop, okay, stop! No fighting!” she shouted. “We all love each other, right? We just said we all love each other! You guys just, you just ki—you—You love each other, and I love you, and we’re going to figure out something that works! Please!”

Hubert closed his eyes and slowly exhaled all his hot air before looking up at Ferdinand with a longing that stretched beyond love by coming from the depths of despair. Ferdinand, too, exhaled, and brought a hand to Hubert’s temple to finger-comb his hair back and tuck it behind his ear.

“H-Hubert, can we… can we _help_ you get rid of those bad guys?” Bernadetta asked. “It’s—they’re everyone’s enemy, right? So what if we…”

“We will return to Garreg Mach and speak with Byleth,” Ferdinand said with soft, but resolute conviction. “We will tell her what we have discovered is lurking under the guise of the Empire, and that you, Hubert, helped us to escape from it. I will implore her to turn the army’s focus away from the Imperial front and instead to target specifically Those Who Slither in the Dark. We know you have a mole in our base already—use them to communicate between us, and we will coordinate our knowledge and attacks to overthrow our mutual enemy.” He nodded to himself as he went over the plan again in his head. “The unity between our armies will open the air for negotiations afterwards. A trial, rather than a bloody war.”

Had he not said it with a tilt of his head and a fond smile, Ferdinand would have taken Hubert’s words as a jab, and it was only now that he realized they had been an earnest compliment all this time: “Your optimism truly is your best quality, Ferdinand.”

“B-but… but what if it doesn’t work?” Bernadetta squeaked.

Hubert smiled her way as well, but covered it with his hand. “And your healthy skepticism is much appreciated to keep him in line.”

“We must separate from the Church of Seiros, no matter what,” Ferdinand said. “It is hardly fair for us to criticize the Empire for their ally’s atrocities when our own has committed its own questionable acts throughout history. This is the argument I will take to the professor, and even if she does not agree, I know many of our classmates will side with me.” He held out his hands, one for Bernadetta and one for Hubert. “We will take our plans one day at a time. First is the destruction of Those Who Slither in the Dark.”

“First,” said Hubert, “is getting off the side of the road, getting food and lodging, and getting proper medical attention.”

But he dropped his good hand into Ferdinand’s, and he squeezed it. Bernadetta took Ferdinand’s other hand in both of hers, nodding at the two of them.

“We can spend one last night together, if nothing else,” she said, then her face flamed red. “I mean! Not like! Spending the—I don’t mean! Oh, Goddess, I don’t mean that, I didn’t mean that, I don’t want—”

“Please,” Hubert chuckled, “we haven’t even had the honor of kissing you yet.”

Bernadetta’s reply to that was a drawn-out, shaky, “Uhh,” that rose in pitch and kept the rosy color fresh in her cheeks.

“One day at a time,” Ferdinand repeated, “in all things. Bernadetta, may I kiss your hand?”

She closed her “uh” with an “um” and, with her lips pressed tight together as if afraid to burst, she gave a small, slow nod.

Her fingers had firm spots of callused skin that brushed magnificently against Ferdinand’s rising hand, but the skin on the back of her knuckles was cool and impossibly soft against his lips. He pressed himself to her for as long as he dared, eyes closed.

“I—I really thought,” she stammered as he finally released her from his kiss, “that you guys would rather just… you know, um, be together without me? Like, that’s okay. I mean, you really like each other, I saw—I swear, I swear I didn’t _mean_ to see, but I saw, and so, um, it’s okay if you want to be together! I’m just! I’m just Bernie, I don’t even really want marriage anyway, so you don’t have to—”

“Bernadetta,” Hubert said in a low, smooth voice. He lifted his hand out of Ferdinand’s and slid it around the one clutching into her skirts. “May I?”

Her jaw shook all the way through its drop. “H-huh?”

“And may I, again?” Ferdinand said with a smile.

“U-uh, um, i-if you—you don’t have to, really—”

“I want to,” Ferdinand insisted, holding her hand less than an inch away, such that he could feel her coolness in his lips. “Bernadetta, I have loved you for years.”

“And, if I permit myself a moment of honesty,” Hubert added, holding her hand just as close, “so have I.”

Her eyes grew wider and wider as they flicked between her two beloveds, first waiting for a punchline to drop, then realizing that no punchline was coming, because this was no joke. 

“Please?” Ferdinand asked.

“Please,” Hubert echoed.

Ferdinand stole a glance at Hubert, because there was something unbearably attractive about him professing his love to someone _else_ , for some twisted reason that did not matter because everything about this moment was perfect, utter bliss, made even moreso when Bernadetta finally gave them the nod. Each swore his fealty to her with a kiss upon her hand.

“I love you,” she whispered to them both. “I _love_ you. But—but if you keep doing this right now, I’m gonna, I’m gonna… spontaneously combust and die, probably? So.”

“Ah.” Hubert set down her hand.

“Is it too much?” Ferdinand guessed.

“Maybe? I dunno,” Bernadetta squeaked. “Mostly, um, I, uh, Hubert, you know? He needs. Help. Medical attention. Right?”

Hubert shifted his feet underneath him with relative ease compared to his earlier weakness. “If I’m to ever live out my dream of holding both of your hands at the same time,” he said, “we should make haste.”

“A worthy dream!” Ferdinand laughed, holding out his hand to help Hubert rise. There was warmth in their grasp beyond that of comrades now. “Until then, Hubert, I shall have you ride with me, to ease the burden off of our dear Bernadetta.”

“I-it’s no burden!” Bernadetta piped up. “I-I can… I mean, if you don’t mind r-riding with me, I’ll… is it because I’m a bad rider? I-I’m sorry, I’ll, I’ll practice more, I swear, I just—”

“Nothing of the sort,” Hubert promised. “In fact, I would gladly ride again with you, if you prefer.”

His fingers slipped out from between Ferdinand’s to reach for Bernadetta’s hand. Ferdinand stepped forward with no valid protest, so an empty, whining, “But I…” fell from his lips instead.

Hubert shot him a gleeful smirk over his shoulder. “My, how the tables have turned,” he cackled. “Are the two of _you_ fighting over _me_?”

“Yes!” Bernadetta said, latching onto Hubert’s arm. “And I’m winning!”

She tugged him and his pink, puzzled expression to her horse, and Ferdinand let her go without another word to the contrary. In that moment, despite all of the turmoil they had gone through, despite the sheer magnitude of the uncertainty that lay ahead, Ferdinand felt sure that the three of them would be alright. Through distance, through war, through the absolute absurdity of having a relationship that consisted of _three_ people instead of the usual two, they would find their way together.

Because Bernadetta would have her way, and Ferdinand and Hubert both would fight to the death to defend it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE BECAUSE **SOMEBODY** [DREW THIS SCENE](https://twitter.com/strawberryphee/status/1363691025869463552/photo/1)!!!!! I'M SCREAMING!!!!!!! THANK YOU PHEE!!!!!
> 
> And that's a wrap!
> 
> Folks, it has been nearly fifty thousand words of Ferdibertadetta. Wow! Whoops. Since you have come so far on this journey with me, I will let you in on a little secret. I am going to take a break from these three fools for a little while, but I fully intend to return. And when I do, it may first be with a silly little epilogue for this fic, because there is something inherently delightful about having a 50k work on AO3 for a niche-as-hell rarepair (pair?), and an idea I tossed around a couple of months ago for a fun closing chapter would be just enough to push this over the edge. I won't commit to it by adding a /9 on the chapter count just yet, but either way, I promise you will have more Ferdibertadetta to look forward to from me. I promise, they will be back. With a vengeance. (Or maybe just with sex.)
> 
> Have a lovely day!


	9. Epilogue: Don't forget me when the writing's on the wall, if you loved me at all

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE EPILOGUE IS HERE  
> THE EPILOGUE IS QUEER  
> THE EPILOGUE CONTAINS SOME BASIC CONTENT WARNINGS YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF SO YOU DO NOT HAVE TO FEAR  
> CW: a full-blown panic attack, more mentions of past abuse (including some hand mutilation stuff)
> 
> And it is once again Bandcamp Friday!! What a perfect time to purchase [Lover by Lo-ghost](https://lo-ghost.bandcamp.com/track/lover) such that all proceeds from the sales go directly to the artists. Please have a wonderful day, and enjoy a whopping _seventeen thousand words_ to finish up our dear sweet tale of Ferdibertadetta.

When Hubert returned to the palace Monday afternoon, it was quietly, as a lone rider, without notice. Edelgard herself only heard about it after it was too late to take tea as a means to catch up with him. He would appear in an instant should she summon him, as one of the girls who serviced his rooms reminded her when Her Majesty questioned her about his status. She did not know exactly what he had been up to for the past two days, but from what she had pieced together from the servants’ chatter, the reports from his agents who had arrived ahead of him late Sunday night, and the missive from Hubert himself that they delivered to her for verification, she thought she ought to let him rest at least another night.

If everything she had heard was true, she would have tried to force him to rest for the entire week. As it was, she rescheduled their Tuesday afternoon tea to the morning, and brought out two small pots on the tea tray to the courtyard, one of the Hresvelg house blend, the other of Dagdan dark roast.

Three things told her that, impatient as she was to hear the details of his latest excursion, perhaps she should have let him take one more day to rest.

The first was that he arrived promptly at ten o’clock, as per the instructions of her revised invitation. Hubert was never just punctual. He would consider himself “running late” if he showed up to an event concerning Her Majesty only five minutes ahead of schedule instead of his usual ten or fifteen, depending on the significance of the occasion. He did not even mention his relative tardiness as he walked to their table in the courtyard, though he did move with haste, and bowed deeply while instead apologizing for his unexpected absence over the past few days. “There was a sudden matter which I felt I had to oversee personally,” he explained, “which, as you see, may have gotten a bit out of hand.”

He gestured to the second thing, or rather gestured _with_ it. His right hand was thickly wrapped in cloth to brace it against a splint curving up into his palm. He set his arm back in his sling with a meek smile before taking a seat, where Edelgard could see more clearly the third thing.

“I haven’t seen bags this dark under your eyes since the days before the assault on Garreg Mach,” she noted, pouring his coffee while holding his eye contact so that he might not notice her doing a favor for him. “And I know you were in your quarters resting for all of last night. Did you have even a wink of sleep in the past three days until then?”

The under-his-breath chuckle could have passed as natural instead of nervous, had he not glanced away from her unflinching stare as he let it out. When he looked back, Edelgard had a knowing half-smile waiting for him.

“I see,” she said, drawing out the words.

His thin brows twitched into a startled frown for a moment, and her smile grew wider.

* * *

The truth was this:

After their brief regroup by the Varley River crossing, Ferdinand suggested, if Hubert and Bernadetta were amenable to the ride, that they continue on to Aegir for a safehouse. In a rural area near the Bergliez border, he knew of a humble farm that would house friend or enemy of the Empire alike, in confidence, as a favor to the von Aegir family. Hubert was pleased with its remote location and, subsequently, with the complete lack of high-status somebodies running around and running their mouths about things they should not have seen. The children working as stablehands were kind to Hubert’s tired horses and fed them almost as well as the matriarch of the household fed the weary travelers. In addition to giving them a well’s worth of water, a furnace to heat it over, and a tub to wash themselves and their clothes, she opened her doors to a spare bedroom. It was all that they needed, save for one thing.

There was only one bed.

It was a bed of a fair size for two in matrimony, but certainly not for three adults still fumbling their way through first kisses. Each of the three had a different proposition for how to resolve the situation. Hubert thought Bernadetta should have the bed entirely to herself, and he and Ferdinand would work out their own arrangements along the floor beside her. Ferdinand agreed that Bernadetta should take the bed, but also urged that Hubert should take the other side of it, owing to his injuries. Bernadetta, on the other hand, wanted Ferdinand and Hubert both to share it without her, for no particular reason.

“I’m not sleeping on it unless both of you are sleeping on it, too,” she repeated obstinately. Her eyes did not meet theirs, but were locked onto an invisible something in a far distance, which meant that this was not her personal wish. It was just something that she could not help but believe was true and that she would abide by, despite all logic presented to the contrary.

They spoke for a bit about whether anyone was prone to tossing, sprawling, or kicking in their sleep. Ultimately, they decided to share the bed among all three of them. Hubert, self-reporting as the stillest sleeper, was elected as the one to lie in the middle.

None of them would sleep well with that arrangement. None had slept well for days. Yet none had any objections.

* * *

“Should I have left our teatime at three today?” Edelgard asked, pouring herself a cup of tea. “I could leave you to get another few hours’ rest, as long as you promised to use it for _rest_.”

“Your Majesty knows that I would not,” Hubert responded with a dry smile. His eyes closed with luxurious sluggishness when he lifted his cup to inhale the rich aroma. “And no, I have been gone for far too long to wait even a moment longer before our briefing. I’ve reviewed the reports on the movements in the northern Kingdom territories and I must caution against an approach from the—”

“Hubert.” Edelgard placed her elbow on the tea table between them and rested her chin on the back of her hand. “We can discuss those matters at the generals’ war council after lunch. What I want _briefing_ on is what pulled you out of Enbarr for over forty-eight hours without warning and returned you with one hand out of commission.”

He pulled his slung arm closer to himself. “I have confirmed that I am able to cast magic with it still,” he said quietly. “As for the expedition, I am drafting the full report, though there will be certain necessary omissions for the sake of both national and personal security. I will make it available to Your Majesty before the day’s end.”

“With a scribe, I hope,” Edelgard said. It was more of an order than a hope.

“If… at all possible,” Hubert relented. “I trust Your Majesty has heard by now that it was a reconnaissance mission. There are some matters to which a common scribe should not be privy.”

“Then find an uncommon scribe,” Edelgard said. “You managed to find one last time.”

The play on words was impeccable. She felt cheated when all Hubert gave her in response was a curious frown over a first sip of coffee.

“A noble one, perhaps?” she added to explain, and therefore cheapen, her extremely good joke.

“I’m… afraid I don’t understand what Your Majesty is implying,” Hubert said, settling his cup on the table with expert nonchalance.

“Hubert,” she said, and now she leaned her other elbow on the table to loom closer to him, “I _personally_ had to verify the code you sent to Merceus. I wouldn’t mistake that handwriting anywhere.”

The coffee cup slid three inches to the left under the sudden pressure of Hubert’s grip on its rim. His head tilted up slowly, eyes wide with dawning horror.

* * *

The truth was this:

Owing to the farm’s distant location, it had an owl on the premises to send messages to nearby towns. She was a half-domesticated barn specimen, perhaps trustworthy enough to carry a summons to a local village for a doctor or healer who could treat a broken hand, but Hubert dreaded the inevitability of relying upon her to help deliver a confidential missive to Empire agents.

“Would that I could travel through time and have a word with the fool who thought to select _owls_ , of all beasts, for the task of letter-carrying,” Hubert muttered, fiddling with the buckles and laces on his clothes and armor in a one-handed, half-hearted attempt to remove them. “Did he mistake the massive heads they carry around as a sign of intelligence instead of a hollow storage space strictly for overgrown eyeballs?”

“Is this part of your dictation?” Ferdinand said snidely.

He sat with unfair elegance, legs crossed at the bare ankles, coat and armor draped over the back of the chair behind him, gloves laid folded at the corner of the small desk at which he, in his pristine white shirt and vest as if nothing had happened to him, held a quill over a small scroll of paper laid flat. Compared to Hubert, who had not even managed to unclasp his cape from his shoulders, and Bernadetta, who had hidden under Hubert’s giant green cloak through the farmhouse until she had made it to the bathroom to wash, Ferdinand nearly looked good as new already.

“I would never speak so quickly if I thought you were transcribing,” Hubert taunted. “As I recall, I will have to speak at a rate of a single word per minute for you to keep up in your foppish calligraphy.”

“It is _not_ calligraphy,” Ferdinand retorted. “Though I am versed in that art as well. I would understand if you could not tell the difference between calligraphy and proper penmanship since they are both so far removed from your fiendish chicken-scratch.”

“Mm. You bring up a good point about chickens,” Hubert said dryly. “Though largely flightless in their domesticated state, even _they_ would have been a better choice for a letter carrier than a _barn owl_.”

“The barn owl most certainly will not be able to deliver your letter if you never draft it,” Ferdinand said impatiently.

Hubert let himself fall back against the pillows with a huff, tugging fruitlessly at his cape. “Why not crows?” he grumbled. “For hundreds of years, they’ve been regarded as tremendously intelligent birds, with known abilities to recognize different humans by appearance. Even wild corvids can be trained to do simple and complex tasks when motivated by—”

“Do you merely fantasize about surrounding yourself with a flock of black birds that do your bidding?” Ferdinand accused.

“A group of crows,” Hubert stated, “is called a murder.”

“I will take that as a yes,” Ferdinand said. “How shall we start this letter? ‘Dearest, darlingest, most majestic Lady Edelgard…’”

Hubert would have thrown something at Ferdinand if his dominant hand were not throbbing and swelling with pain. “Perhaps it is not too late for me to schedule that execution for you in the capital.”

“You would break Bernadetta’s heart,” Ferdinand said so easily.

Hubert, on the other hand, was not accustomed to being a man with weaknesses. His attachment to the Emperor was not one that could be exploited like those that he had just forged with Ferdinand and Bernadetta. He bristled at Ferdinand’s reminder that he was no longer the perfectly devoted agent of Lady Edelgard that he used to be.

“Well?” said Ferdinand, oblivious. “Before the ink dries on the tip of my quill, Hubert.”

The cover letter that he had Ferdinand compose was simple and to the point. He worded the message as if it were obvious that his supposed kidnapping were a part of a reconnaissance effort, in that he did not make mention of the kidnapping at all. Outside of the injury that decommissioned his writing hand, he declared it a success. He stated his approximate location and his estimated date of return, and promised to verify it with a series of codewords known only to those at the highest security clearance levels in the army, as poorly as he would scrawl them with his left hand. In all the time that he took to speak, slowly and clearly to give Ferdinand time to transcribe each word, he only managed to remove his cape.

“That will do,” he said to both Ferdinand and to himself. The taste and smell of iron filled his mouth as he scraped his teeth along each finger of his bloody glove until it was loose enough to bite into a fingertip and pull it free of his left hand. The right glove was a challenge he was not yet ready to face.

Ferdinand sighed after the laborious task of writing one or two paragraphs and set the quill back into its inkwell. “Will you deign to ask me for help a second time,” he said, turning and leaning in the desk chair to face Hubert, “or must I insist?”

Hubert frowned. “Insist upon what?”

He sighed again, slower and longer. “Sit, Hubert,” he said, rising from the chair. “Write your portion of the note.”

* * *

“Whose handwriting was it,” Hubert said carefully, bringing the coffee back to his lips in a ploy to hide his face.

“Hubert,” Edelgard sighed, “I knew who you were with before I ever saw the missive. There were whispers that he had been here in the palace right before you left.”

After a long sip, Hubert leaned back in his chair with a horrible grimace, crossing his arms. “Among the servants, I presume,” he muttered. “Your Majesty need not be bothered to procure a list of names. I will vet them out one by one. The matter was to be kept discreet and confidential, and all those who violated their orders should have their clearance and privileges of—”

“ _Hubert_ ,” Edelgard interjected again. “I invited you to tea this morning because I wanted to tell you, as soon as I possibly could, that you don’t have to hide these things from me.”

She waited with a warm smile when his head shot up in bewilderment, searching her eyes. “Begging Your Majesty’s pardon,” he said warily, “but I disagree. Had I failed in this mission—and I very nearly did,” he added, raising his injured hand, “the only thing that would have kept Your Majesty safe from accusations of treason, by association, would have been complete ignorance of my activities.”

“What you do in your personal time is none of the Empire’s business,” Edelgard stated. “I understand that you want your privacy, Hubert, but if you had simply _told_ me you wanted to see him, you would not have had to sneak around and have agents incite mutiny as a distraction while you took vacation.”

Hubert stared blankly at her. He blinked. “Vacation,” he repeated, then, “Begging Your Majesty’s pardon, again?”

“No need, you’re quite right,” Edelgard said with a small wave of her hand, “I shouldn’t have called it a vacation. You must have worked hard to orchestrate this, even if you didn’t enact it personally. Not only have you given us an opportunity to charge Count Varley with violating his house arrest, _and_ allowed his servants to unionize and protest their working conditions, you have lowered public opinion of his house to the public who are still practicing their faith. They were sympathetic to the Ministry of Religion until now.”

He took it all in slowly, as if he had not considered the full reach of his activities until now. A rare crooked smile crept onto his face, through he hid much of it by holding a hand to his forehead. “I suppose that all did happen,” he admitted. “Might I ask what makes Your Majesty so sure that I did not enact it personally?”

“Your alibi is secured by the timing of the missive from Aegir territory,” Edelgard said, “where you were doing… _reconnaissance_.”

His face folded further into his hand at the tone in which she spoke that loaded word. In all their years together, she had never seen his ears so beet-red before.

“We’ll see what we can do to keep your relationship from becoming more of a public affair, but we may need to weaponize it as a distraction to maintain your innocence,” Edelgard said, as teasing as she dared. “Our ‘friends’ insist you were involved at Varley. But the time it would take to travel from there to Aegir _and_ complete an honest reconnaissance mission means it was completely impossible for you to still be in Varley when the mutiny began at three o’clock. They haven’t found a witness who saw you there after two.”

The color in his face was almost under control by the time he snapped out his hand for his coffee again. “Of course they haven’t.”

“Will they?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“No,” he said before another long sip.

“Then perhaps you can keep your privacy,” Edelgard said with a smile. “But may _I_ ask, privately, how long you have been together? Because you’re either ambidextrous with a razor, or”—she reached out to run a playful finger under his chin, where she knew his sparse facial hair grew fastest—“you trusted someone enough to help you shave yesterday.”

* * *

The truth was this:

Hubert was shaky and clumsy enough with the quill grasped in his left fist, forcing it through the motions of known letters despite the errant inkblots and scratches, without Ferdinand leaning over his shoulder, tenderly reaching for and unbuttoning the clasps of his jacket. “These are confidential codes,” Hubert muttered reluctantly as Ferdinand’s chin nestled over the juncture of his neck and shoulder to reach for his tunic belt.

“I am not looking at your codes,” Ferdinand said with arresting warmth, pulling the sash from Hubert’s waist.

When Hubert finished writing and folding up his message, pressing its creases with the back of his wrist, Ferdinand coaxed him away from the chair. There was no reason for his fingers to slip underneath the shoulders of Hubert’s coat, for his hands to slide down the length of Hubert’s arms as he removed it. Hubert savored the touch of each and every fingertip.

Ferdinand’s lovely fingers came next to the brooch pinning his ascot. He shuddered involuntarily to have someone else’s hands so close to his neck, experiencing for the first time the horrible and delightful mix of danger and comfort. When those hands moved from unwinding the ascot to undoing the buttons of his shirt, thumbs grazing against his bare chest, his breath hitched. “Ferdinand,” he pleaded.

“Hubert,” Ferdinand mimicked, quirking half a smile. “You will not be able to do this on your own, with your hand as it is now. Let me help you.”

He was worse than trembling as Ferdinand worked his shirt open all the way down his chest and his belly, even before Ferdinand slipped a finger under his waistband to unclasp the two buttons on his breeches.

“Hubert,” Ferdinand said again when Hubert flinched at the touch. He spoke more softly this time, just a hot breath against his neck. “I love you, you fool. Know that I am here to help you with whatever you need. Take the next bath after Bernadetta is done, and do not hesitate to call for my aid.”

Hubert could not breathe already, so he could make things no worse by dipping his chin lower, touching it to Ferdinand’s soft cheek, and inviting him to look up. His hands shook until he pressed them to the sides of Ferdinand’s face, ugly fingers settling into his tresses, mouth melting into the warmth of Ferdinand’s smile.

So—this time, perhaps, the truth was exactly as Edelgard surmised.

* * *

Once he was done choking down his coffee, he said, eyes still averted, “I maintain that it is best that Your Majesty know as few of the details of this as possible.”

“If you insist,” Edelgard sighed. “Though, can I ask how you _did_ get that wrist injury of yours?”

His thin, tight lips twitched. “I’d rather not say,” he said.

“Aha.” Edelgard smiled broadly. “Could I take a guess? Some sort of… horse-related mishap, perhaps?”

Hubert flicked his eyes back to her with the hint of a smile. “If that seems plausible to Your Majesty,” he said.

So it was more embarrassing than a tumble from horseback. Edelgard considered the matter spoken aloud.

“The two of you really were _quite_ busy during your time away, weren’t you?” she teased.

He narrowed his eyes at her. She spooned sugar into her tea, keeping her pleasant smile.

“There’s just one thing I don’t understand in all of this, if you’re willing to tell me this much,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have remembered it, had the uprising not been at House Varley, of all places. When we were at school, wasn’t Ferdinand entirely taken with Bernadetta?” She leaned over the table. “And, for that matter, weren’t _you_?”

Though his face stayed pale this time, his eyes were so shocked that it bordered on betrayal. “I—I’m afraid I must beg Your Majesty’s pardon yet again,” he stammered in an attempt to save face, “but what could have possibly indicated that I ever—”

“Hubert, I had never seen you dote on someone so much in our entire lives, myself included,” Edelgard insisted. “It’s clear you had feelings for her once, even if you don’t anymore. And I will drop the subject if that’s something five years gone. I was just curious.”

“It’s… clear I had feelings,” Hubert repeated, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m unsure how that conclusion came about, but let me apologize profusely if Your Majesty felt slighted by any indication of favor I may have inadvertently shown to Miss von Varley during our time at the academy. She is but an inkblot in the pages of my memory now, as are all of those who betrayed the Empire after Your Majesty’s declaration of war upon the Church.”

“All except Mister von Aegir,” Edelgard pointed out.

His hand twitched when it reached for his coffee.

“An inkblot, hmm,” she said, swirling her sugar spoon in her teacup. “I did wonder whether the two of you were projecting your feelings for each other onto her. It was so disheartening seeing you both drag her between you during our academy days, you know.”

He drained his cup and came close to slamming it down on the table for lack of finesse. “Quite,” he agreed flatly. “I apologize for my past foolishness in such matters. Your Majesty is certainly correct that I have never had any feelings for Bernadetta.”

* * *

The truth was this:

“Don’t tell Ferdinand,” Bernadetta whispered. “Please, please, please, please don’t tell Ferdinand.”

“You have my word already,” Hubert said, lifting his head from the pillow upon which his washed hair had left a wet spot. “But what is it that I’m to keep secret?”

“I just!” She slid her fingers up among the roots of her hair, still damp from her own bath, and starting to curl from the constant touching. “I, I don’t know when I’m going to see you again after this, but I’m—I don’t know. I’m scared, okay? I’m scared, even if it’s stupid to be scared. I’m just scared and that’s how it is and everybody just has to deal with it.”

“Unfortunately,” said Hubert, “I don’t believe it will be a secret to Ferdinand that you are scared of something.”

“No, he—he _knows_ I’m scared, that’s the problem!” she moaned, tugging at her hair. “So he _can’t_ know I’m—oh my gosh, I’m doing this. I’m really going to do this. Oh, no, oh no, oh no…”

“Can I… help you, Bernadetta?” Hubert said tentatively.

“I—yes? I mean, no. But yes. No.” Lowering her hands from her flushed face, she drew in a loud, but shallow breath and closed her eyes. “Ugh, okay, Bernie. Okay. You can do this. It’s not that scary. It’s just—” She popped one eye open and squinted at Hubert with a small grimace. “Just Hubert.”

“That cannot be terribly confidence-inspiring, I’m sure,” Hubert said.

With a tiny whimper and an even smaller stamping of her feet—comfortably in clean socks, while she herself was dressed in a plain nightgown courtesy of their gracious hosts—Bernadetta covered her face again. “No. No, it’s _okay_ ,” she stated forcefully. “It’s okay, because I love you, and you—well, you _said_ you… I mean, you basically said y-you lo—right? You, you did say, you said you…”

Hubert struggled not to smile. Pure levity filled his lungs when he inhaled, and it made his next words easier to say than they had ever been in his life. “I love you, Bernadetta,” he assured her. “More dearly than I know how to say in words or in gestures. I beg your patience as I learn the ways to express it.”

Slowly, her hands slipped away from her face. Her eyes sought his. They did not falter as she stepped toward him and perched herself at his edge of the bed. After that, they still did not falter, but flicked almost imperceptibly down.

Almost.

“Bernadetta,” Hubert breathed, “if you are truly… _scared_ , I beg you not to force yourself to do anything before you feel ready.” He laid a very light hand against her arm, a touch so tentative it was more warmth than contact. “Please.”

Her hands dug into the blankets beside his thigh as she paused in trying to lean forward. “But what if this is the last time I get to see you?” she squeaked. “What if we can’t convince the professor to help us, and we don’t defect from the Church, and—”

“What if,” he said in return, pressing his hand more firmly to her arm, rubbing his thumb along her soft skin, “I swear to you that I will find my way to you and Ferdinand again, no matter what happens?”

Her eyes came up from his mouth to study the eye she could see. With a shaking hand, she reached out to comb back his hair from his other eye, and studied that one, too. “What if,” she said weakly, “I… I want to do this, even if I’m scared?”

“Then I would call you _nervous_ ,” Hubert suggested, “not _scared_.”

“O-okay.” Her hand settled behind his ear, two fingertips fiddling with a small lock of his hair. “Nervous. Yeah.” She swallowed audibly. “Really, _really_ nervous.”

Slowly, Hubert lifted his hand from her arm to her cheek, mirroring her. “Nervous is natural,” he said softly. “I admit that… you are not alone in those feelings.”

“I feel like I’m going to throw up a little bit,” Bernadetta whimpered.

“Ah.” Hubert winced and withdrew his hand. “Perhaps, in that particular feeling, you are alone. Are you certain you want to—”

“Yes! I mean, I—yes,” Bernadetta insisted. She caught his elbow inside of hers and nuzzled her cheek into his hand before it could retreat. “If I don’t do this, I’m gonna regret it for however long it takes us to find each other again, and I’ll be really upset about it, and I’ll miss you even more than I’ve been missing you for the past five years, and I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna kiss you, I’m gonna kiss you right now, in three, t-two—oh my gosh, no, wait, let me start over.” She jerked her head back a few inches and squeezed her eyes shut. “Okay. It’s okay, Bernie, we’ll try it again. With a bigger countdown. Ten, nine, eight…”

Hubert joined in under his breath at seven. Her eyes lit up at six. He put his voice into it on five. Their faces began to drift closer by four. The vowel of three made him smile, even if he did not mean to, but Bernadetta exhaled two with a soft giggle. Her breath touched Hubert’s face just before her nose did. They closed their eyes at one.

He meant to be gentle, to let her lead, but her lips quivered so unbearably that he could not help but press himself into them to hold them close and safe between his own. To think that he had considered Ferdinand’s lips the softest thing his skin had ever touched. Despite being chapped, bitten, and still bloodless cold, her lips had a give and movement to them that made his whole being ache to touch her. His fingers sank deeper into her hair, finding their way back to the nape of her neck to cup her head closer to his. Before he lost himself, he sealed the kiss—lingered on the seal, but who could fault him, who could blame him—and pulled back to let both Bernadetta and himself breathe.

“Alright?” he whispered.

Her eyes were round, pupils dilated so wide that just a sliver of grey circled the edges. “Oh,” she said softly, more like the sound had fallen unbidden from her slightly parted lips, now redder than they were a moment ago.

Hubert shifted his hand from her neck to steady her shoulder. “Bernadetta?” he prompted gently, trying to keep concern from his voice.

“C-can. Can we,” she said in breathless fluster, “can I kiss you again?”

* * *

“I would have thought that once… well.” Edelgard tapped her spoon against the rim of her cup to shake off the clinging drops of tea. “Once everything turned out the way that it did, when we declared war, that Ferdinand and Bernadetta would have courted off together, just because they ended up on the same side of things.”

Hubert hummed a note of disagreement as he stared into his empty coffee cup.

“You don’t think so?” It was not often that Edelgard got to indulge in idle gossip. She would drink it as slowly as her tea. “Why not? Because of you?”

The sharp laugh he let out was so bitter, it was nearly a scoff. “I think, rather, because of Bernadetta herself.”

“It seems you gained a deeper understanding of her in our time at the academy than I did,” Edelgard teased. “Tell me more.”

“Only a hunch. I wouldn’t put any real stock into it,” Hubert said smoothly. “It does please me to tell Your Majesty that she once sprained Ferdinand’s wrist because he would not leave her alone.”

Ripples bloomed across the surface of Edelgard’s cup when she laughed into her tea. She sealed her lips around a smirk as she tried to swallow. “Did she _really_?” she could finally say. “I knew there was a fight in her, she was just too self-conscious to let it out.”

“She may have little sense of what she wants for herself,” he said with a slow nod, “but she has always had a very stubborn sense of what she does _not_ want.”

With her lip pressed to the rim of her cup, she said, “Say what you will, but I think you believe that because you would have been absolutely devastated to see the two of them together, no matter which of the two of them you thought you were jealous over.”

He pursed his lips and stared at the coffee pot as if contemplating another cup.

* * *

The truth was this:

When Ferdinand returned to the spare bedroom, his hair hung heavy and dark with moisture, soaking through the pale shirt already clinging tightly to his broad shoulders. He scrubbed at his wet face with his towel as he shut the door behind him, then looked up with a fresh smile, bright enough to replace the fallen sun.

Bernadetta placed a hand on Hubert’s sternum to push herself to her feet. He blamed that for his aching breathlessness for as long as he could.

She tip-toed up to Ferdinand, her path crooked and cautious, not unlike a rabbit zigzagging through a field to confuse its predators. He smiled warmly, then with surprise when she came closer and closer still. His jaw fell slack when she pressed her hands against his chest and leaned against him for support as she rolled up onto her toes.

He made a startled noise that died into a buzz on Bernadetta’s lips when their faces met, but his arms entwined around her like a dancer holding his partner, balanced and secure and graceful. A lock of his hair slipped from his shoulder and tumbled over hers, followed by another.

The desperate panging struck Hubert’s chest even harder. The word _jealousy_ occurred to him, more the suggestion of the feeling than the experience, but that could not be the right word. He wanted to ride this gentle pain, wanted to watch the beautiful sight of two beautiful people kissing each other, for as long as he could.

* * *

Edelgard took the coffee pot into her hands before Hubert could grab it. She already had her response ready to his objection before he opened his mouth, and spoke loudly over it, “Just this one time, when you cannot even pour it for yourself.”

As she filled his cup, he thanked her with a dip of his head from which he did not rise, staring spitefully at his gently steaming coffee. “You need not lower yourself to this level,” he said bitterly. “This is a task for servants, not Your Majesty.”

“This is something I would do for any friend, Hubert,” she said. “We are meeting today not as Emperor and Minister, but as friends. That’s why, instead of asking you about reconnaissance and policy, I’m pestering you about Ferdinand.”

“I would much prefer reconnaissance and policy,” Hubert muttered, bringing his cup to his lips. Hot as it was, he began drinking without even blowing on it first.

“Should I start another pot now?” she teased. “At this rate, you’ll get through this first one rather quickly.”

He lowered the cup and paused, staring at the rim. Though circles often darkened under his eyes these days, usually the look in his eyes themselves was hard, determined, and unyielding. Today, his gaze was wandering, buzzing, and uncertain.

“You look like you might need it to get through the day,” she said gently. “Did the two of you sleep at all?”

She could not keep a straight face when he glanced up, eyes narrowed. She tried to hide the laugh in her teacup. With a noise of exasperation, he slid his good hand in front of his face, pinching his temples with his thumb and ring finger. It did little to conceal the wash of pink taking his face.

“I assure Your Majesty that I have given it an earnest effort,” he said stiffly, “but sleep has been… elusive lately.” He raised his splinted hand. “As a result of my injury.”

* * *

The truth was this:

Had Ferdinand and Bernadetta not awed and fussed so unbearably over the thick wrappings in which the local doctor had entrapped Hubert’s broken hand to stabilize its scattered bone fragments, Hubert might not have insisted upon retiring as soon as he returned to the bedroom. Ferdinand and Bernadetta were just as exhausted as he and readily agreed to turning in early, in theory. After Hubert laid himself in the dead center of the bed, the other two squabbled over which side of him had more room and tried to insist upon letting the other take it to sleep. Hubert squeezed his eyes shut against the still-lit lamps and folded his arms over his stomach. “Will you just lie down already,” he grumbled when the back-and-forth had gone on for at least five minutes and neither of them would do him the dignity of blowing out the lights.

“Hubert, please, make yourself comfortable first,” Ferdinand said.

“I am quite comfortable,” he said.

“You are lying straight on your back with your arms crossed, like a corpse,” Ferdinand protested.

Hubert pried one eye open to study his body. He could not find fault with Ferdinand’s assessment. “This is how I sleep ordinarily,” he said. “I told you that I would be unobtrusive in a bed.”

Ferdinand, on the other hand, had given fair notice that he was a light and restless sleeper, which was ultimately why Hubert agreed to being placed between him and Bernadetta. While Bernadetta peacefully curled herself into a spiraling nest with the quilt she had claimed as her own, barely using the pillow they had given her, Ferdinand tossed, turned, curled his legs in and stretched them out, fussed with his edge of the blanket and just how many limbs would be under or outside of it at any one time, and generally got all of his lovely hair all over Hubert’s face with every movement.

Finally, Ferdinand decided how much of the blanket he wanted, and that was none at all. Pushing it away from himself with a soft huff, he slid to the edge of the bed to sit up. The moonlight from the window was bright enough to illuminate his two hands scrubbing through the roots of hair, then holding his face.

Hubert could not reach far enough to his right with his left hand. His palm settled inches short of Ferdinand’s waist, into the heavy warmth he had left behind on the bed.

Ferdinand turned at the sound of him shifting. “Hubert,” he breathed. “I am sorry—you were so still and silent, I thought you were surely asleep by now.”

There was a quip to be made about how anyone would seem still and silent in comparison with Ferdinand’s thrashing, but Hubert was too tired to speak it. “What’s the matter,” he whispered instead.

“Nothing,” Ferdinand responded so quickly that a crack of his voice slipped through.

Hubert was much too tired to guess at this.

“I am much too tired to guess at this,” he said.

Luckily, he had a companion for whom jumping to conclusions was a well-trained habit. She lifted up a head shrouded in mussed hair from under her duvet. Before Ferdinand could finish apologizing for waking her, she was speaking over him: “I-is there not enough space on the bed? Oh, I _knew_ there wasn’t enough room with me, I should—”

Hubert’s hand was waiting to push her back to the bed when she tried to get up. “Absolutely not,” he said lazily, with an absent stroke of his thumb over the little warmth of her arm.

“Um,” said Ferdinand timidly, “may I ask the two of you something?”

“You already have. You may ask again if you must,” Hubert said. Bernadetta muffled her giggle with the edge of her blanket.

“If—if it does not make you uncomfortable—and please say if it does, I do not mean to impose, or…” He pressed his face into his hands and exhaled. “It is just… I am unused to such warmth in the bed, and I find myself overheating. Would it trouble you if I were to remove my, er, my outer layers of sleepwear, such that I, well, that is to say, I would be, er—”

Oh.

“Sleeping in your smallclothes,” Hubert finished.

“Oh,” Bernadetta echoed in a high, shallow whisper.

The line of Ferdinand’s throat was perpendicular to the window. Moonlight followed the shadow of his Adam’s apple bobbing with a thick swallow. “I,” he began, and did not continue.

“O-okay.” Bernadetta pulled the blanket over her head as she curled up into her ball again. “Okay! Okay. Just, um, it’s okay. Yep. It’s fine. Wait—” She poked her head back out. Starlight caught her round eyes looking up at Hubert. “If, um, it’s okay with you? Maybe? I, I, I was just, oh, but I’m all the way over _here_ —” She gestured at herself with a flap of blankets. “And you’re, you’re right there, so—so it should be _your_ decision, you know, if you’re okay with—with—!”

“No—no, this was foolish, never you mind,” Ferdinand said suddenly with a shake of his head. “That sort of, er—that would be wholly inappropriate, of course. Please, do not think anything of it—if possible, do not think of it at all. I apologize if I wake you in the night should I rise to cool myself with a walk, which will be sufficient to—”

“Ferdinand,” Hubert said loudly, “I am so fucking tired. Do whatever you need to do so that you stay asleep in this bed and stop bothering me.”

That shut everyone up rather quickly.

“Right,” Ferdinand said, soft and sheepish, as he slid off the mattress. “My apologies.”

Bernadetta stayed under her blanket. She did not speak, make a sound, or move again.

At some early point in his life, Hubert had decided to affect coldness in order to fit the role that Lady Edelgard needed him to play. At some point beyond that, some point he had not exactly noticed until just now, his affectation had become more than just that. Now, all he knew how to be was cold. Somehow, for reasons unfathomable, two outsiders saw and loved beyond that, saw and loved something Hubert had buried under practiced years of frigid ways, only for him to freeze up again just when they had coaxed him to the verge of safe vulnerability.

If inaction could lead to his desired result, he would feign a lack of interest. If something demanded that he ask for what he want, he would rewrite the script, manipulating the dialogue until his option was an inevitability instead of a choice, and pretending all the while that, of course, this did not particularly please him. If even impersonal condonation still implied softness, he would fake reluctance.

He had found himself _wanting_ when Ferdinand and Bernadetta had first climbed into bed alongside him, teetering at the edges of the mattress such that nary an inch of their turned backs would so much as brush against his arms. He could not initiate such contact, because that would mean admitting that he felt this _want_ , that all the kisses and touches he had been given today had done nothing but awaken an insatiable hunger. It was a new weakness exposed, something between physical and psychological, this infinite backlog of human experiences he had denied himself for as long as he had been denying he was human.

He wondered how long he had been slinging barbs at Ferdinand as a way of disguising his true wants, both from the object of his unwitting affection and from himself.

Ferdinand’s shadow glided across the room to a corner of darkness. Only the sound of fabric against skin told how he peeled off his sleepwear. The gentle rustle of his clothes hitting the floor might as well have been thuds in the quiet, or perhaps they coincided with the weary, anxious pounding of Hubert’s cold heart. If he was trying to be quiet—and from the slow roll of his feet along the floorboards, it sounded like he was trying—Hubert would have to teach him the proper way to walk like an assassin in the morning.

Ferdinand ran his hand along the fleece blanket, trying to find its edge in the darkness. Hubert lifted it with his arm to allow Ferdinand back underneath. They collided for an instant, the brush of Hubert’s knuckles against Ferdinand’s molten skin, but that was all it took for Ferdinand to take in a shuddering gasp.

“Your fingers,” he whispered with a breathy chuckle, “they feel so cold.”

“Apologies,” Hubert mumbled, drawing his arm back.

“No—”

Ferdinand seized his forearm with two warm hands, then slowly, gently pulled Hubert’s hand to his chest. Hubert could feel the dip between Ferdinand’s hot pectoral muscles under his palm. He struggled not to press deeper.

“It is soothing,” Ferdinand exhaled, eyelids fluttering closed. “May I hold them here?”

Earlier that day he had promised, with his innate warmth, to weather the cold to stay beside Hubert. Here he was acting upon that promise already, figuratively and literally. Hubert could not keep the smile from his face, nor the breath of a laugh that rushed through it.

And he tried. He tried to be an ounce the man that Ferdinand was. He did not say _yes_ , but he did relax his hand against Ferdinand’s chest and whisper, “I treasure your sincerity, as always, Ferdinand.”

Ferdinand breathed a contented sigh through his nose. His soft head of hair leaned slowly into Hubert’s cheek. Hubert sighed, too, feeling the warmth bleed into him, and closed his eyes.

* * *

Edelgard curled her pinky into the delicate little handle on the side of the creamer and poured a white stream into Hubert’s cup. He blinked at the sight of his black coffee growing lighter two times before what was happening seemed to register in his tired mind. His face gathered into an unholy grimace as he all but swatted her hand away. “What are you doing,” he demanded.

“Keeping you from scalding your tongue, I hope,” she replied, wrapping her fingers back around her own teacup. “And I know you like the taste of it with cream, as long as there’s no sugar. You just don’t like to let yourself have nice things.”

His lips were pressed together in a tight frown as if studying the state of his tongue in his mouth at her first suggestion. At the second suggestion, his eyes flicked up with suspicion.

That was fair, because she was beginning the conversation she had really wanted to have with him this morning. She sighed and slid her hand across the table towards him.

“We both know,” she said in a low voice, “that with the professor now against us, in addition to all of our former classmates and the Church of Seiros, we may lose this war.”

Locking his eyes on Edelgard’s outstretched hand, Hubert drew in a shallow inhale through his nose. His fingertips clenched into a tighter curl around his splint. His lip and eye twitched in a wince of pain from the agitation of his injury, but he swallowed through it.

Edelgard let her eyes fall, as well, to her half-empty teacup. It was the first time either of them had spoken the words aloud. She took a slow, steady sip of tea. It had gotten just a bit cold and she had stirred too much sugar into it. She filled the cup and the silence with the slow trickle of fresh, hot tea from her pot.

“All of that to say,” she said, just as Hubert tentatively began, “It is possible that—”

She set down the pot and looked up. He shook his head fervently, still not meeting her eyes.

“Please, Your Majesty,” he invited quietly.

“No, Hubert, say your piece first.”

He folded his arms and crossed his legs, his good fingers fidgeting at his elbow in arhythmic taps. “It is possible that we may be able to divide our enemies from each other by using a wedge from within,” he said.

That Hubert had not given this information to her as soon as she brought up Ferdinand by name made her doubt the question was worth asking, but she spoke it anyway: “Is Ferdinand acting as a double-agent of the Empire for you?”

He lowered his chin further as he recrossed his legs. “Not exactly.”

She nodded, letting her eyebrows rise a little. “That’s a more hopeful answer than the outright ‘no’ I was expecting,” she admitted. “In either case—in the event that the war continues along its current trajectory to… to the end.” She breathed out serene stability and, from her teacup, swallowed calm warmth. “I have a request to make of you.”

Here his eyes darted up to meet hers at last, molten with fury, and his limbs came unfurled. “Respectfully, I will not be able to take it,” he said. “In no reality will I live to draw breath longer than Your Majesty. I will fight to the last protecting you. Not a single drop of your blood will spill until every last of mine seeps from my body.”

She pressed her eyes shut to steel herself. “But that is exactly what I am asking of you, Hubert,” she insisted. “If it is inevitable that I am going to die in this war—if you have someone you love waiting for you on the other side of it—I am asking you to _live_. For him. For _me_. For the sake of our secret war against the dark, if that’s the only thing that will convince you to live on.”

Though she still could not open her eyes, she felt Hubert’s fingers finally slide up to her own, curling tightly. “My Lady,” he said with rare weakness in his own voice, “I cannot do what Your Majesty asks of me. It was not my charge to follow Your Majesty’s orders. It was to protect you with my life.”

She squeezed her eyes and her fingers both, feeling the hot pinpricks of tears under her eyelids. She inhaled as quickly and deeply as she could without letting it sound like a sniff. The air still shuddered out of her mouth.

“Just this once, I want to protect _you_ ,” she said. “You are like a brother to me, Hubert. I often felt, through all these hard years, that all we had in this world was each other. But now you have someone else who knows this side of you. Your kindness. Your devotion.”

She dared to open her eyes. Blinking through the bleariness, she found his expression as pained as her own.

“I would be _devastated_ if I lost that. If I lost you,” she half-spoke, half-whispered, as much as her failing voice would allow her. “If you have let someone else see your good heart—Hubert, he would be devastated, too.”

Hubert’s hand squeezed hers. “Then you understand perfectly how I could not bear to lose you, either,” he uttered.

Edelgard gave up.

She pulled her hand out of his and planted both of her palms on the tea table, pushing herself upright. The back legs of her chair caught between the cobblestones tiling the courtyard when her thighs shoved it backwards, and it clattered to the ground behind her. By the time she had made it halfway around the table, Hubert had crossed the other half and was waiting with open arms.

“Does Ferdinand know yet,” she croaked after a long stretch of silence, aside from the quiet sniffles and gasps into Hubert’s chest and the hushes into Edelgard’s hair, “how good your shoulders are for crying on?” She took a half-step back from him, rubbing the tear tracks from her cheeks. “I hope they’re not wasted on him.”

Hubert glanced aside, bringing a hand up to adjust his hair. Edelgard was not sure whether it was to hide wet eyes or pink cheeks, but he was clearly hiding _something_ by the way he cleared his throat quietly and just said, “Well.”

* * *

The truth was this:

Ferdinand was a snorer. It was not terribly loud—in fact, it was just loud enough to be charming, somehow—but it was the first thing Hubert was ready to blame when he woke on his left side, curled just slightly, and felt empty space on the bed in front of him.

The edge of her silhouette, curled up by the desk, glowed pale from the faint light of the window. The near-fullness of the moon shone in the reflection of her half-open eyes fixed on the night sky.

“Bernadetta,” Hubert murmured.

That alone was enough to rouse Ferdinand from his light slumber. His snore fizzled out with a soft snort even before Bernadetta jumped so violently that it rattled the desk chair a few inches across the floor. A horrified “ _no_ ” clawed out of her throat when both Ferdinand and Hubert startled upright in the bed to face her.

“Bernadetta,” said Ferdinand, and how lovely his voice was when it was scratchy with sleep, and how inane it was for Hubert to let his thoughts drift like that at a time like this, “are you alright?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she moaned, shaking her entire body along with her head with each repetition of the word. The duvet bundled her in the chair where she perched more than sat, a steady shield behind which to hide her face when she ducked. “Now you’ve done it, Bernie, now you’ve _really_ gone and screwed it up—”

Her voice was so high and ragged with breathlessness that she sounded close to tears. Ferdinand and Hubert both reached for their blanket at the same spot, their hands half-overlapping, but attempted to fling it in opposite directions. Ferdinand’s strength won out, only for him to freeze halfway to rising when he realized that he was still wearing next to no clothing.

“You’ve done nothing of the sort,” Hubert said to Bernadetta. He got his hands underneath the blanket Ferdinand had so lovely dumped squarely on top of him in his rush to rise, and draped it over Ferdinand’s bare shoulders.

“Bernadetta, sweet one, what is the matter?” Ferdinand asked, drawing the blanket around himself as he stepped cautiously closer.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “P-please don’t kill me, I’ll leave. I’ll—I’ll go away, I’ll go and walk away and rot in the woods, it’s okay—”

Until this point, Hubert had waited at the safe, unimposing distance at the edge of the bed, blinking through the dark to seek out more details in her face. He rose swiftly to counter her rambling self-deprecation with, “You will do no such thing.”

As sharply as he interjected, Bernadetta’s reacting gasp was even sharper. As hard as Ferdinand elbowed him in the gut, Bernadetta’s shuddering whine, like a sob about to burst, hit him even harder.

“Hubert!” Ferdinand hissed in reprimand. “What do you think you are doing? Do not speak to her that way!”

The backs of Hubert’s shoddy knees hit the edge of the bed and buckled. He fell back to the bed, blinking, as Bernadetta’s blurry, darkened features receded into her blanket.

“Don’t,” she pleaded. “You can—beat me up, and throw me against a wall, and—i-if you’re g-going to—to cut off my fingers, you can—you can start with my r-right hand—please, j-just don’t _yell_ , please?”

Ferdinand did not need to shoot a scathing look over his shoulder as if to say, _I told you so_. Hubert already felt unfathomably ill.

“My sweet Bernadetta,” Ferdinand whispered, approaching her as slowly as if she were a skittish pegasus with an arrow-pierced wing, “everything is alright. You are safe here, and loved. Can you breathe?”

When he stopped speaking, the silence filled with only her stuttering breaths for several painful seconds. “No,” she finally squeaked out.

Ferdinand crouched at her chair, holding out a single hand, palm up. “Dear one,” he cooed something mournful. “What is troubling you so?”

Her blanket flapped with two waves of her arms, once emphatically, once less so. “I don’t know!” she whined. “I can’t breathe? That’s, that’s troubling.”

“You are breathing well enough,” Hubert said quietly. His hands twisted into fists in the bedsheets beside him with the effort of staying still and far away where he could do no more damage. “You will breathe better in due time.”

Ferdinand gave him an encouraging smile, as if to say, _That’s better_ , or perhaps, _That is better_ , since he never used contractions. Hubert tried not to make a face at him.

“I, I’m sorry, I just,” Bernadetta said, followed by a shallow gasp, “sometimes, I—I can just… look at anything. _Anything_. And then my stupid Bernie brain figures out some reason to be afraid of it.”

“Anything?” Hubert repeated with a frown.

“Is that why you are sitting here in the dark, without a lamp?” Ferdinand asked, and Hubert could hear the smile in his voice even if he could not see it. “So that there would be nothing for you to look at?”

“Um.” Bernadetta shifted in her blankets, poking her head out enough to look around the dark room. “No, I, um. I just didn’t want to. Wake you guys up. But I did anyway? I’m really, really, really, really sorry!”

“You did not wake us up,” Hubert stated, struggling to respect the fine line that separated firm from stern. “As I recall it, I woke of my own accord, then woke Ferdinand by speaking. If the fault lies with anyone, it is with me.”

This time, Ferdinand did not give him a cue as to whether he had done well or made things worse. It was possible he, too, did not know. Hubert’s breathing was silent, a trained habit coaxed out by the darkness on reflex from his time spent skulking in the shadows. Ferdinand, he could just barely hear breathing, slow and steady. Bernadetta was somewhere between hyperventilation and panting.

“Shall we… light a lamp now?” Hubert offered awkwardly. “Or does Ferdinand’s point about the darkness obscuring your fears still stand?”

“Actually, um. Now I’m… scared of the dark,” Bernadetta confessed, pulling her blanket over her head. “Because you mentioned it, and I thought about it too hard, and. Um.”

They shuffled around her without speaking. While Ferdinand reached for the lamp at the writing desk, Hubert crossed over the bed for the candle on the side table. They sparked and lit one after the other, casting a warm glow that found Bernadetta burrowing into the cocoon of her quilt, all but a sliver for her eyes.

(That same light caught Ferdinand resembling an Almyran prince in repose, the way the patterned trim of the blanket tangled with his curls, draped over his shoulders, and framed his sunkissed, sculpted chest—but it was not the time to think of such things.)

“You,” she eventually said, as Ferdinand returned to his kneel before her, as Hubert crawled back over the bed towards them both, “you didn’t laugh at me.”

Hubert had laughed at her once. It was the first time a successful intimidation had left him feeling, instead of the usual gleeful satisfaction, a guilt much heavier than the weight of a girl’s unconscious body carried back to her dorm room. He never made that mistake again.

“Of course not,” Ferdinand said, perfect and sweet and warm and everything Hubert could not be for her. “Did you fear that we would?”

“I mean. Yes?” She let her blanket fall enough to free the worried line of her mouth, clearing the muffle from her voice when she spoke again. “I… I just told you I’m scared of the dark. I’m twenty-three years old and I’m scared of the dark.”

“I would never laugh at you, Bernadetta,” Ferdinand promised. “If it helps you to laugh at your fears, then I will laugh with you, if you would like. But I will never laugh at you.”

With the room better lit, they could watch how his kind words dissolved on impact when they reached Bernadetta, never making it inside her head. Her unblinking stare made hypervigilant flicks from Ferdinand to Hubert, from their eyes to their mouths to their posture, then darted around the room.

“Is there something else you are afraid of?” Ferdinand asked.

“A-anything.” Her answer was immediate. “Point at something. I’ll—be afraid of it in five seconds flat. Somehow.”

There was not much in the room to point at. Ferdinand proposed the first item: “The lamp, which has fought back the dark.”

Bernadetta’s wild eyes swiveled and focused on it. It was only three seconds before she winced and said, “I feel like it’s—gonna burst. Like the glass will just— _pew!_ Shatter. And then, _bam_ , it’ll be dark again. And there’d be glass everywhere, and oil, and so it would be too wet to sweep up.”

Hubert thought about the shattered glass, swimming in a pool of blood, to which he had exposed her earlier that day. He wondered if that particular intrusive thought was his own fault.

“And then the little bits of glass would get in the floorboards, anyway, the spaces between them,” Bernadetta rambled on, “a-and then you can never _really_ clean it, and—” Her feet shifted underneath her, pulling in closer. “And now I’m thinking about all the dirt and stuff that’s between the floorboards, and now I feel _mean_ because I’m afraid that someone else’s house is dirty, and that’s really rude of me to think, right?”

“Could you think about the moon?” Hubert suggested. He lifted his face to the window to find it near full, peering through the glass. “Surely there is no worry of its light going out.”

Bernadetta tilted her head to see it. For a moment—for five precious seconds—while the shine filled her eyes, she seemed almost calm. Then, just as before, she clenched her eyes shut tight and shook her head. “Nope! No, I.” She shook her head harder and pulled her blanket in tighter around her. “Thought about the inexorable passage of time. Wow. Okay. Uh, that’s terrifying. We’re all gonna die someday! Okay.”

“Ah.” Hubert grimaced, and failed to smooth over the sour look on his face before Bernadetta had snapped her eyes up to him. With a hand covering the half of his face that his hair did not, he added, in a tone somewhere between wary and paying a compliment, “That certainly is a… profoundly powerful talent you have.”

“Bernadetta,” Ferdinand said so softly, “are you afraid of _us_?”

“No, _don’t!_ ”

Before the echo of her yelp died in the stale air of the bedroom, she yanked the edges of her quilt up and over her face, shutting herself away in her bundle of blankets to squirm and shake.

“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she pleaded against a mouthful of thick fabric. “Don’t make me think about it. I can’t think about it. I don’t want to be scared of you, and if I think about you right now, I’ll find _something_ , and then I’ll ruin everything, I’ll ruin the one good thing I’ve ever had in my life that’s ever made me feel, just, _happy_ and _safe_ and. And I know I’m going to ruin it all some day, it’s just what happens, it’s just another day in the life of Bernie, but—just—not yet. Please, not yet.”

The look Ferdinand gave to Hubert was not admonishing or encouraging or anything in-between. Now he was looking to Hubert at a loss for words, for what to do or say next to ease Bernadetta’s troubles.

A fine choice that was.

Angling for a distraction, Hubert said, “I cannot help but notice that you seem to have obscured yourself in the dark again, despite being afraid of it,” skirting that line between gentle and teasing in a way that had Ferdinand drawing his eyebrows together and pouting in disappointment.

With a strangled noise like a gasp crossed with a gulp, Bernadetta burst from the blanket, clawing it away from herself, clawing the shape of darkness from her bare skin even when the blanket was far gone. She stumbled out of the chair and nearly leaped over Ferdinand, a flurry of a nightgown, to fold herself impossibly into a shaking shape in the tight space between the bed and its adjacent table.

“What’s wrong?” Ferdinand asked, a monumentally more relevant and helpful question than what tumbled blind out of Hubert’s mouth, which was, “How did you even manage to fit in th—”

“I’m—I’m not _usually_ scared of the dark, I swear, i-it’s just right now!” Bernadetta squealed. Her tense hands, braced on either side of her face, rapped against the wooden table when she shook her head in that crevice where she had far too little room to sit, let alone move. Better her knuckles than her skull, but the sounds were sharp enough to make Hubert wince. “It’s just—it’s just—” Her voice rose into something breathlessly high until it dwindled into a whimper: “I’m scared.”

Ferdinand moved slowly, keeping his hand low, relaxed, and palm-up, but Bernadetta still flinched when he held it out towards her, as if expecting a strike. “May I hold your hand?” he whispered.

“I—I—” Bernadetta stared wide-eyed at his open palm, her own fingers crawling up her face and knotting into her hair as they climbed. “I don’t know.”

“That is alright. I want you to do and say whatever makes you feel comfortable.” He let his hand sink to the floor on which he knelt before her, but he did not withdraw it. He left the offer open. “Is there anything either of us can do to help you?”

Her eyes did not waver. The rest of her body quaked, enough to rattle something on or inside the bedside table every time she filled her lungs with enough air to press her side against the wooden frame, which was at once too often and not often enough. Too few of her inhales were deep enough to expand her ribcage to the fullest degree, yet her respiration rate was so rapid that at least one of her inhales every few seconds would make the table shake along with her.

“I don’t know,” she squeaked out again. “I just—I feel— _bad_. Like—like I did something bad. Like I’m going to—like he—he’s going to—”

How Ferdinand could keep his extended hand relaxed was beyond Hubert. Even his swollen, broken fingers tried to curl into a fist. His left hand was painful, bloodless tight by his side.

“Everything just—keeps coming back to that moment,” she forced out between gasps. “When I—it was dark in the, in the servants’ passages, and I—I keep going back there. With him. And I—” She squeezed her eyes shut, gripped her head harder, and shook it again. “So now I’m afraid of the dark. And the blanket made it dark, and now I’m afraid of a fucking blanket. It’s so _stupid_.”

“He has tainted everything,” Ferdinand realized. “Everything that you fear, it ties back to a memory you have of ways he has wronged you.”

“He—he didn’t even— _wrong_ me, or whatever, that time!” Bernadetta protested. “I, I, I _beat_ him. I got the better of him and I won and I got away. But I—I’m so scared he—he’s gonna—I _never_ win. Not with him. He’ll come back, and he’ll remember, and he’ll… There’s always consequences. And now I just… I just wait. I wait for it to come.”

The gasp she drew in here had a decidedly different character than all those anxious ones before it. She finally blinked, and her eyelashes came apart with tears laced between them.

“Bernadetta,” Ferdinand exhaled, pained by the sight.

“I just want someone to hurt me,” she whimpered. “To—to get it over with. I know it’s coming, and it’s worse that it’s always coming than if it just—” Her voice broke into something rawer, and she rubbed her palms over her eyes in wide swipes. “If someone just _killed_ me already. I feel like—like everywhere I go, everyone _knows_ I’m guilty, and I don’t even know what I’m guilty of. Just—just something my stupid dad thinks I did wrong, and I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know what he _wants_.”

She dragged her hands down her face, already red from crying and redder still from the way she pulled and pressed at her delicate, pale skin. Old tears were smeared across her eyelids while fresh ones gathered in their corners. Her eyes lifted to Ferdinand, to Hubert, to Ferdinand, to each of their eyes, their mouths, their hands—

With a conscious effort, Hubert uncurled his fingers and let both of his hands hang limp at his sides.

“But if I mess it up, he’ll find me,” she sobbed. “That’s what my stupid Bernie brain thinks. It thinks he’ll find me, a-and he’ll—he’ll—”

“At the monastery.” It struck Hubert like an epiphany, scattered pieces suddenly coming together into the solid shape of a cohesive story, of cause leading to effect. “It was not his will to send you to Garreg Mach. You hid in your room even there because you feared his retribution would come to you eventually.”

“And what’s his retribution?” Bernadetta kicked her legs out in weary frustration, palming her wet eyes again. “He yells at me, I get tied to a chair, maybe I get hit a little, so what? I—I’m a knight now. I bleed more in a day than I ever bled before in my life. I almost die sometimes and it’s okay, so—so why am I s-so scared of being hurt by him? Why does he still get to hold all this stupid power over Bernie?!”

Hubert moved a little too fast when he fell to a crouch beside Ferdinand. He could tell, because Bernadetta flinched and drew in a stuttered gasp as he knelt, kicking herself further back into the small recess beside the bed.

“Because he was your father,” he said with the weight of patricide on his words. “Because he showed you cruelty when he was honor-bound to show kindness. Because he was the first person ever to hurt you and mean it, when he was meant to love you. Because when you march to the battlefield, you consent to the pain of combat, but when you walk inside your own home, you were ambushed by it as a tool of control through fear. Because he is a horrible man who has done horrible things to you when you didn’t deserve them, Bernadetta, and it shaped your entire perception of what you do deserve.” He held his hand out as a mirror of Ferdinand’s. “I don’t know how to undo that damage. I can only say that I’m sorry for what you have gone through, and are still going through today.”

Ferdinand recognized, when Hubert did not, the sudden wooden groans that split through the silence. He shot to his feet and shoved away the side table that Bernadetta could not budge with the limited room she had to push. As soon as he freed her from the crevice, she barreled forward. Hubert caught only a flash, of shining tears beading on eyelashes and glistening tracks across skin, of lips pulled back in silent pain, of something deep in Bernadetta’s eyes connecting to something deep in his own, of being _understood_.

Then she hit his chest hard enough to knock the breath out of him, clutching his sleepshirt with such desperate tightness that he feared it might rip in her grasp. As his arms circled tight around her in almost unconscious motion, he felt a third pull on his shirt where she had pressed her face to his shoulder, where hot, moist, fast breaths pulled in and out of the thin cloth. She clenched the fabric between her teeth to bite back her sobs into something quiet.

After lifting and setting the table quietly back into place beside the bed, Ferdinand turned slowly back around, the fleece on his shoulders lilting around him like a cape, to gaze upon Hubert and Bernadetta curled and tangled in each other on the floor. Or so Hubert thought, until Ferdinand kneeled before them and his gaze was locked on Hubert alone, something soft but smoldering in his eyes, glowing amber by the warm lamplight.

The pads of his fingertips grazed softly across Hubert’s forehead in their path underneath the hair hanging in front of his right eye. That sensation was nothing compared to the way those fingers raked across Hubert’s scalp as they swept back his curls, and the softness, the pity—the _love_ —in Ferdinand’s fond look. He was as worried for the wounds of Hubert’s past as he was for Bernadetta’s.

Hubert was scarred, yes, but Bernadetta was bleeding. He shook his head as if to say, _not me, not now,_ and tucked Bernadetta’s head under his chin.

Ferdinand sighed through his nose. He combed all the way through Hubert’s hair until he was cradling Hubert’s head just as Hubert cradled Bernadetta’s. Those scars Hubert had thought healed never felt closer to breaking than when Ferdinand pressed his warm, soft lips to Hubert’s temple in a kiss flooded with a kind of love Hubert had never thought himself worthy of. The raw edges of his own wounds burned and ached with something cathartic in vulnerability. He understood Bernadetta anew.

His fingers moved in sympathy along her back, drawing slow rhythms of loving touch over the patterns and seams of her nightgown. He pressed his cheek to the ethereal softness of her clean hair, then a small kiss, when he could hold it back no longer. At the impact of his lips, she shuddered in his arms, but it was a release of pressure, an undoing of something tightly coiled inside and around her.

“It’s alright, love.” The word “love” fell so easily from his lips for her. She was so easy to love. “It’s alright to cry.”

The tension in the fabric near his shoulder loosened. She let out a choked, muffled whine.

Ferdinand’s hand slipped from the nape of Hubert’s neck down to his far shoulder, enveloping him in grounding warmth. After murmuring her name, a soothing sound to let her know he approached, Ferdinand circled his other arm around Bernadetta. Their heads piled together in the center of their uneven bodies united, Bernadetta smallest and shriveling up smaller between gangling Hubert and broad Ferdinand. The asymmetry, the oddness of three bodies embracing instead of just two—either because of it or despite it, they interleaved together like perfect river stone brickwork.

Bernadetta pulled one hand from Hubert’s shirt, as heavy and desperate as if her two hands carried as much weight as her feet, and reached blindly for Ferdinand’s chest. “Oh— _fuck_ ,” she said in a broken half-sob when her hooked fingers found no purchase against him. “You’re still naked.”

Ferdinand recoiled when pressed with that barb, falling flat on his (clothed) rear for lack of balance. Pulling the edges of the blanket inward to cover his bare chest, he protested, “I am not _na_ —”

“I was going to ask whether Bernadetta would like to make a switch to lie between the two of us in bed,” Hubert muttered, “but I suppose that answers the question.”

“N—no, I…” Bernadetta narrowly missed Hubert’s jaw when she snapped her head up to look at Ferdinand, scrubbing her free hand across her eyes. “I didn’t mean… I’m not… B-but I, I should—I could be—I… _want_ to be on the edge? If, if I—in case I—I, I dunno, I just.”

“We can keep the original sleeping arrangements. Next to me, if it does not bother you.” Hubert ran his hand down the length of her hair from her crown to the base of her neck. “If not because of Ferdinand’s state of undress,” he said, speaking through Ferdinand’s continued blathering, “then because he is horribly prone to tossing and turning, whereas I remain relatively still.”

The silence from Bernadetta as she deliberated her wants and needs, he anticipated. When the weight of Ferdinand’s unexpected silence stacked on top of it, he felt unease settle in his gut. Ferdinand and Bernadetta’s eyes were locked, an unspoken conversation bouncing between them. Very slowly, Ferdinand dipped his head into a single nod, more concession than agreement.

“Relatively,” he repeated as if skeptical.

Hubert took a moment to realize what Ferdinand was saying, and by then, Bernadetta was already speaking her piece.

“Yeah, um. Actually.” She dabbed her wet eyelashes on the backs of her fingers, then turned her shining eyes up to Hubert with an expression he could not hope to read yet. “I-it wasn’t a _bad_ thing, I just… well… You kind of, um, cuddled me? In your sleep?”

Dread is a cold thing in the pit of the stomach, but it turns hot in a way that defies the laws of thermodynamics when it so suddenly flips into shame. If Hubert said anything when his jaw fell ajar, he did not remember a single syllable.

“You were the first of us to fall asleep,” Ferdinand chimed in with an unfathomable smile—kind? earnest? mocking? all of the above?—as he lifted a hand to Hubert’s warming cheek. “We both watched you roll onto your side, toward Bernadetta, and even lay an arm over her.” The smile quirked higher, and his thumb stroked across Hubert’s cheekbone. “You are rather endearing in repose, Hubert.”

Mocking. Definitely mocking.

“I assure you,” Hubert sputtered, drawing back from both of them to kneel before Bernadetta with his hands pressed flat to the floor, “I had no intention of—nothing of the sort. I was not aware that I—I beg of you, forgive me, Lady—”

He bit back the automatic _Edelgard_ that nearly followed, but it came through even to his own ears, as clear as they burned red. He stammered a “Lady Bernadetta” to save face. Ferdinand sputtered a laugh out and snorted a laugh in.

“No—oh, oh my gosh, Hubert, um.” Bernadetta was as flushed as he, if not moreso, waving her hands in protesting dismissal. “I. Um. I. I, it was, I—it was n-nice. I… i-i-if you want to, I.” Her voice fell to something small and timid, as if she were telling a secret instead of something she had spoken in words and actions throughout the past half-day: “I like you.”

In that moment, Hubert had the rare sensation of not knowing what he was showing on his face. It felt stretched at strange edges, warm with a flush, perhaps twitching. He smothered it in both hands, one thick with plaster and gauze. “I am going back to bed,” he stated, “and I am lying straight as a log, and I will not hear anything more on the topic.”

“C-can I still—I mean, can. Can I,” Bernadetta ventured tentatively, “maybe, um—even if you’re—I mean, i-if it doesn’t bother you, could I—?”

Even without seeing her, he knew what she was asking. His heart did a revolting flutter in response, one that flipped his stomach in foolish circles. His face grew hotter against his palm.

“Hubert would not dare deny you anything your heart desires,” said Ferdinand, and in addition to the indignity of hooking his hands under Hubert’s armpits to hoist him to his feet, he added, “ _Lady Bernadetta._ ”

“She is a woman of noble bearing,” Hubert growled in feeble defense as Ferdinand roughly herded him back into the bed. “It is her proper title.”

“If you say so, Lord Vestra,” Ferdinand replied, half-lifting, half-shoving Hubert onto the mattress. Bernadetta’s blessed little giggles chased his voice. “Please service milady as she requests, milord.”

Hubert regretted his boldness in ever joking about harems and concubines. That word, _service_ , took on a treacherous set of meanings under that lingering context, as dangerous in only his own thoughts as if in all of their minds. As he rolled away from Ferdinand to the unsafe haven in the center of the bed, face down, he squeezed his splint to cause his barely-healing hand a sobering throb of pain. “I will have you _executed_ at _dawn_ ,” he hissed.

“Now, darling, you must not make those empty threats.” Ferdinand draped the fleece from his shoulders over Hubert. “You could frighten our dear Lady Bernadetta.”

“No, Ferdinand, cut it out,” Bernadetta whined, climbing into the bed from the opposite side. “I-it’s okay. I feel a lot better now, actually?”

“In that case, let us all go the _fuck_ back to sleep.” Hubert dragged the blanket over his head.

Ferdinand snuffed out the lamp, and Bernadetta blew out the candle with a heavy gust, both holding back laughter. In the darkness, independently of one another, they each nestled closer, closer still to his stiff, straight body, plying it into softness with their warmth.

“I’ll kill you both,” he grumbled with no bite.

“Shh,” said Bernadetta, her broad smile audible in her voice and palpable in the shift of her cheek against his shoulder. “Go the fuck back to sleep, Hubert.”

“Lord Vestra,” Ferdinand corrected.

“Lord Vestra,” Bernadetta repeated.

“Executions,” Hubert said with his face directly in his pillow. “Dawn.”

* * *

“Well?” repeated Edelgard.

Hubert lowered his hand from his recomposed face and folded his arms behind his straightening back. “Just as we would not talk about what has happened here,” he said carefully, “I should not disclose whether or not anyone else has had their own… _moments_ in my private company.”

Edelgard gave a wry smile. “I suppose that’s fair.”

He strode past her to right the chair she had knocked over. She humored him by taking the seat he offered her, though she leaned onto her toes when he pushed her chair in towards the table to lessen its weight.

“So,” she said when he had seated himself opposite her again, “are there any other details from the _reconnaissance_ you would like to share with me, or shall we move on?”

“Indeed, there is one detail which Your Majesty should hear in advance of the full report so that we can prepare to discuss it at this afternoon’s council. The army of the Church of Seiros is planning an imminent strike,” Hubert said in oblivious monotone. “I had hoped to cross-reference the information with our ‘friends’, as I’m almost certain they already know of it, but if their faith in us has been shaken by recent events, then I can predict beyond reasonable doubt that the Church intends to take the bridge at Myrddin. We may be able to leverage the resources of the southern Alliance territories, particularly Gloucester.”

“Oh, Hubert,” Edelgard groaned, resting her cheek on her fist. “You really _would_ rather talk policy than about your personal life, wouldn’t you.”

Hubert gave her a vacant stare and a blink. “I… yes, Your Majesty. I thought that much was obvious.”

“I was a fool for hoping.” She shook her head before soothing her raw throat with more tea.

“I have effectively been gone without warning for the past two-and-a-half days, and I have returned at only partial capacity,” Hubert recounted slowly and seriously, leaning his right elbow and its splint further forward on the tea table. “I come with news that the Church’s new army plans to invade, after our intelligence operations and suppression efforts have repeatedly proven that they are a formidable foe that will strain our resources. It is _imperative_ that I return immediately to my work.”

His good hand clenched into a fist on his trouser leg, bent out from under the table in Edelgard’s clear view. He did not seem to notice her eyeing it from over the rim of her teacup as he spoke.

“So you’ll once again work yourself to the point of burnout so horrible that it one day drives you out of the capital for comfort?” she accused gently.

He did not take the accusation gently. His face paled and fell, eyes widening.

“I tease, Hubert. But I do worry about you,” she said, setting down her empty cup. “I don’t think you’ve had an honest day off in six years. I can’t even count the time you’ve just spent with Ferdinand, because you couldn’t help but plot a _coup_ while you were in the area.”

He looked positively disgusted as he muttered, “I do pride myself in my efficiency.”

“You _are_ a little bit human, deep down, you know,” she warned. “And even if you aren’t, I can guarantee that Ferdinand is. If you have any hope of keeping him happy, you really should plan to take more vacations.” Before he could interrupt, she added, “ _Real_ vacations.”

“Inconceivable,” Hubert stated immediately. “My duty is to Your Majesty. I have no time to waste on _courtship_. Even if I were… goaded to do such a thing, by some certain indiligent fop.”

“I would give you time to waste on courtship, Hubert,” Edelgard said. “And, evidently, you will forge the time yourself when you don’t know how to ask for it.”

“It is _unnecessary_ ,” Hubert said with clenched teeth, leaning forward and honestly fisting the fabric of his trousers with desperation. “Diligence now will win us a future where we can—hypothetically, of course—afford such luxuries. I cannot and will not waste a single second on frivolity until this war is won.”

Edelgard did not press the point that the war might not be won. She spoke it in her silent eye contact. Hubert showed he heard it when he pressed a sigh through his teeth and glanced aside.

“It’s not wasted time, Hubert,” she said instead. “If something recovers you as much as those two days with Ferdinand seem to have done, it is worth every moment.”

Hubert frowned, looking first at his splinted hand still in recovery, then at Edelgard for an explanation.

“You are exhausted, Hubert, physically,” she agreed, “but mentally, you are sharper than you have been for moons. Even when you could not see it yourself, it has pained me to see you haunting the palace like a shell of a man who has given his soul to the war.”

She smiled, and his eyes flicked to the movement. She smiled even brighter.

“Your face has life now. You _make_ faces—you have expressions other than… muted anger,” she said. “Sometimes, you were so consumed by work that it felt like you were just staring through me whenever I tore you from it. I’ve been teasing you so relentlessly this morning because it’s so encouraging to get honest reactions from you, after so long.”

His expression bloomed here, opened in the slow, cautious way of a budding rose, as he murmured a subconscious, “Your Majesty.” She could not read what he held on vulnerable display, but there was something _to_ read, something that made him look a little bit like a child. He had never looked like a child in his entire life.

“I can tell how special he must be to you, Hubert,” she said. “It’s as though he’s breathed life back into you.”

* * *

The truth was this:

It was not until the moment that Ferdinand finally left his embrace and turned away that Hubert’s heart sank, and it all settled horribly into his gut: that this was the end, if not just for now, then forever, because war could make one day a different world from the next. As the panic seized him, his hand seized Ferdinand’s wrist. His mouth and throat were dry as he uttered an unbidden, “No.”

“Hubert?” Ferdinand said in that terribly soft voice of his, the same one that had pulled Hubert back from the brink of death twice, carrying all the warmth of the same sun that haloed in his red-gold hair.

“Don’t,” Hubert begged on a whisper. “Not yet.”

“Hubert, I must go,” Ferdinand whispered back with a bright but bittersweet smile, tugging against Hubert’s grip. “Do not be so difficult.”

“Wait,” Hubert pleaded, louder, his raw voice splitting the silence. “Just—one more moment.”

As he said it, he did not know what one more moment would give him; after he had said it, he knew what was the regret lingering in his stomach. He opened his mouth to speak it, but the words failed on his halting tongue, heavy with apprehension.

Before he could make another sound, Ferdinand took Hubert’s face in both hands and pulled him in to press a kiss to his forehead. “I will return to you before you know it, my sweet fool,” he promised. “Release me before I pry your fingers loose myself.”

“Ferdinand.” The simple sounds of his name left Hubert tongue-tied with the weight of the confession threatening to follow. “I…”

Ferdinand’s fingers against his were too strong. His hand fell away, his arm too heavy to hold up. He blinked bleary eyes as Ferdinand gave him one last smile, then turned away again.

The jolt hit him once more, even harder. “No,” he called in a desperate, throaty growl as Ferdinand’s gentle copper waves drifted and bounced away behind him, getting farther and farther away from his outstretched hand. “Ferdinand, I—I…”

Ferdinand looked over his shoulder, tilting his head with a knowing smile.

And that was just it—he knew. Even if Hubert had not yet said it aloud, not in exact words, it was the subtext of the thorny lines he did say, the truth motivating his actions, the sentiment in his touches. Ferdinand already knew.

But this was Ferdinand von Aegir. He deserved to hear it properly.

“I love you,” Hubert said like a vow.

The knowing smile split into something even warmer and fonder. He came back, laced his fingers with Hubert’s, and pressed their joined knuckles to his perfect lips.

“I know,” he said.

Hubert closed his eyes as Ferdinand leaned closer. Heat soothed his eyelid when Ferdinand feathered it with a kiss. His hand came up to Hubert’s hair, combing it back so that he could kiss the other eye as tenderly as the first.

“I love you, too, Hubert,” he whispered. “But please, go back to sleep.”

Oh.

Awareness crept back into the corners of Hubert’s vision, detailing them with the cozy cottage bedroom lighting with the sunrise spilling in through the window. He sagged back into the mattress in a daze. Ferdinand’s curls, disheveled with sleep, cascaded haphazardly over his still-bare shoulders and back while he sought out his clothes. The sunlight made his skin glow golden, highlighting every sinew and scar that composed his beautiful body. Hubert thought he would never close his eyes again.

When next he awoke, it was to a hand rubbing circles into his back. He pulled in tighter, protecting the something precious he held in his arms, something soft and warm and sweet-smelling.

“Oh, I see,” came the gentle laugh above him. “When I leave, you beg me to stay, but when I return, you want nothing to do with me.”

As she curled up and settled herself inside the deepening curve of Hubert’s body, Bernadetta made a high, trilling whine that sounded more like it came from a sleepy cat than a human. Too incoherent with sleepiness to express his fondness for her in any other way, he nestled his face deeper into her tangled hair.

“Bernadetta, my sweetest, could you convince him to wake up? I have brought you both breakfast.”

Hubert lifted his nose and inhaled curiously. “Coffee?” he asked in a voice made small by his dry throat.

“Yes, darling, coffee.”

Hubert had never had an honest lazy morning before. He associated this spirit of malaise with sickness so debilitating that even he could admit to himself that he was better off in his bed than at his desk. Whether psychosomatically induced by association, or innate from days on end of sleepless nights finally catching up to him, or simply caused by his body responding to the stress of an injury to heal, Hubert was exhausted. As the three sat on the bed around Ferdinand’s tray of breakfast tea, coffee, and fresh pastries, Hubert slumped against whoever was nearest to his side at any given moment, and ended up with his head in at least one person’s lap at a time, even as Ferdinand scolded him to sit up while eating.

“I thought you would be more of a morning person, Hubert,” Bernadetta giggled as she idly twisted her fingers through his hair.

“He is only a morning person in that he is such a disastrous night owl, he will stay up straight through to the next day,” Ferdinand replied.

“I sleep,” Hubert muttered in weak protest. “Usually.”

“I am not convinced.” Ferdinand rubbed his thumb at the corner of Hubert’s lip for some errant crumb or coffee stain.

“It’s… kind of nice to see you like this.” Pushing his hair back from his face, Bernadetta cupped his cheek to tilt it upwards. When his eyes slid open, he was too tired to fight the smile rising to meet hers. “It’s like… I think I’m not scared of you anymore.”

“You were _scared_ of—” Ferdinand cut himself off in the middle of his incredulous question. “No, never mind, I can see easily how that would be. I am just surprised you managed to fall in love with him despite it.”

“M’surprised either of you managed it,” Hubert mumbled, turning his face back into the divine comfort of Bernadetta’s thighs.

“Hang on, Hubert, wait, look at me again.” Bernadetta rolled his head over again to face her, staring intently at his expression. “No, you were smiling before.”

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I didn’t…”

“No, do it again?”

When he reacted with a dumbfounded blink instead of the smile she was seeking, she took matters, and his cheeks, into her own hands. With her fingers, she stretched his lips up and out into such a ghastly shape that she recoiled and reared her hands back up to shield her face from the sight. Her legs jerked at the same time, leaving Hubert’s heavy head to tumble back to the mattress.

“Nope! Okay, nope, still scared of that one,” she squeaked. “But. That doesn’t count, right? …Right?”

Ferdinand’s arm slipped behind her shoulders and around her waist as if the gesture to hold her securely by his side were effortless and unconscious. At the same time, with the same nonchalance, his knee shifted towards Hubert’s dropped head, extending an invitation as a replacement lap. With a halfhearted wriggle, Hubert climbed the few inches up and over Ferdinand’s thigh—warmer than Bernadetta’s, and dangerously firmer.

“Bernadetta,” Ferdinand was saying with undue awe, “you were afraid of his _smile_?”

Now her hands seemed to shield the world from her face, rather than the other way around. “M-maybe, um, a little?”

“I try to avoid it when possible around you,” Hubert insisted.

Before he could tuck his face into the folds of clean cotton breeches, Ferdinand caught his turning head by the curls catching between his fingers. “You _do_. I have seen it,” he realized, holding Hubert’s gaze with wide eyes. “Even when she would make you smile, you would try to suppress it, or failing that, cover your mouth. I always thought you were being needlessly stern.”

“Wait, _what_? You did what?!” Bernadetta yelped. “N-no, I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean it like that! You didn’t have to—”

“Would do just about anything for you,” Hubert said too softly and indistinctly to be heard, and probably for the best.

“I just meant, when you, when you—when you smile like… you know the one!” she peeped out. “The evil one. And the laugh.”

Ferdinand’s thigh twitched underneath Hubert’s buried face, just before his rolling, unstoppable laughter rang up to the ceiling with delight.

“Stop that,” Hubert grumbled.

Bernadetta stoppered Ferdinand’s mouth with one of the flaky pastries he had somehow concocted from scratch in the kitchen. She split another one in half, its jellied center oozing as she pulled it apart with her fingers, and placed one half between Hubert’s waiting lips. This was his second snack administered by her hands, a tart berry in contrast to the previous jellied Noa.

“Could you ever get used to this?” Ferdinand sighed after he finished the pastry. “To spend slow mornings together as lovers do, as we are now.”

“No,” Hubert responded instantly.

Bernadetta snickered, which was, in itself, a joyous sound beyond the mirth it already expressed inherent in its laughter.

“For once, I find I might agree with you, Hubert,” chuckled Ferdinand. “I feel uncomfortable in comfort. There is always work to be done, and I cannot rest easy while it waits. But these brief, occasional moments of respite…” He carded his fingers through Hubert’s hair with a satisfying degree of roughness, snagging through snarls and scratching along his scalp. “This, I could live with, I think.”

Hubert could tell Bernadetta’s hand from Ferdinand’s with his eyes closed, by not only its size but also the positions of the calluses—Ferdinand’s were softer, in fact, on the underside of each knuckle, while Bernadetta’s were larger and firmer, localized closer to the tips of the fingers. Sliding her palm under his cheek, she turned his face up, peering into his opening eyes as she rested against Ferdinand’s shoulder.

“I… I’d fight a war for this,” she decided quietly. “For you. For both of you. And for everyone. For the professor, for Edelgard… yeah.” She nodded slightly. “For everyone to be able to have moments like this, every now and then, forever. I’ll do it.”

Hubert glanced away from her warm, intense gaze to meet Ferdinand’s eyes. His own resolution to this cause, and the motive behind it, felt just like both of theirs combined. He craned his head up, not knowing which one of the two he wanted to kiss more, only to blink and both of them were kissing his cheeks. His breath rushed out hot and weak the longer it lasted.

* * *

“Take the rest of the day off, Hubert,” Edelgard ordered.

Hubert snapped back to attention out of whatever brief reverie had seized him that made his eyes drift to the side and dusted his cheeks with a fond pink. “I cannot,” he said immediately.

“You can and you will,” Edelgard insisted with a smile. She began to stack their cups back onto the tray. “You need your rest to do your job appropriately, and you have not had it. You are dismissed for the day. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”

Hubert’s jaw hung open, but no words came out until after she had stood and picked up the tray. In fact, it was with gritted teeth that he spoke again. “For the next four hours,” he bargained bitterly. “Please. Let me attend the council this afternoon.”

With a fond roll of her eyes, she retorted, “Only if you truly spend this time at _rest_. Don’t make me station a guard outside your bedroom door.”

“I have just had a rather large dose of caffeine,” he protested feebly.

“You have coffee before going to bed, Hubert. You’ve told me it usually calms you down rather than waking you up.”

His face turned from a grimace into a petulant, near childish pout. Knowing she had won this battle, Edelgard turned away from their tea table, carrying the tray with her.

“I’ll see you at the meeting later,” she said in parting. “If you’re feeling up to it. You are, of course, excused if you wish.”

“I will be there, Your Majesty,” he stated.

She smirked. “If you insist. Rest, Hubert.”

He did not rest, or not yet. At the tail end of a hefty sigh, his hands, even with one wrapped in a splint, came upon hers, and took the tray from her grip.

“I shall rest as Your Majesty wills,” he promised, “ _after_ I take care of this.”

“You had better,” she threatened.

He smiled, with a tilt of his head and a glow in his eyes she had not seen for perhaps years, and she couldn’t help but let him walk away with the tray and without a promise to follow her order.

On paper, this meeting between them was for the Emperor to reprimand her Minister for his insubordination. That was what she had informed her generals and other staff, anyway, when they demanded censure for his sudden absence, and that was what they would know of the event forevermore. The embarrassment she had caused him was likely punishment enough, if punishment were even a thing he deserved.

He was not at his best as her unwavering servant, she knew. Where his ideas diverged from hers was not a weakness in their unified front, but a broadening of their power, a whole greater than the sum of their parts.

* * *

The future was like this:

The war had formally ended moons ago, in a flurry of treaties ratified, hands shaken, and parades marched through the streets. Those Who Slither in the Dark had fallen nearly a year ago. The so-called army of the Church of Seiros was nothing but a distant, almost laughable memory; it had not dissolved as much as it defected to the Empire, splinter by splinter.

Hubert would not say that had was trying to keep things secret, so much as he was just a private person by nature, and the other party in question was of a similar disposition. He was sure that Lady Edelgard had already figured out their particular arrangement with the same intuition that she had used to draw a favorable connection between him and Ferdinand despite their mutual avarice.

This was not the case, as she indicated one day when her newly appointed Minister of Culture—the department established in replacement of Varley’s now-defunct Ministry of Religion—slid a mug of coffee on a napkin across the council table to the Minister of Education—a similar situation for the classist roots of House Vestra’s creed—and kissed him on the cheek before taking her seat.

Countess Varley’s very first cabinet meeting was adjourned before it began.

“ _Both_ of them?” Her Majesty, Emperor Edelgard I of Adrestia all but screamed.


End file.
